Thank You for Helping Us Help You Help Us All
by C-Rowles
Summary: What, exactly, is GLaDOS’ story? What pushed her over the edge all those years ago? And what, exactly, is the deal with Chell, her newest test subject? One thing's for certain: Aperture Laboratories has more than its fair share of secrets...
1. Sarcasm Quotes

_Author's Notes:__ The red phone with its sliced wire, the ransacked, empty offices, the insane scribblings on the walls… Aperture Laboratories has a lot of secrets, and the only being who knows them all—or thinks she does—has a few screws loose herself. What, exactly, is GLaDOS' story? What pushed her over the edge all those years ago? What the heck is up with that cake recipe?_

_Hell if I know. I'm just a fanfic author dicking about. :3_

_Ha ha ha ha ha. Someone shoot me._

---------------

After all she had been through, it had been easy: a portal here, a portal there, and _voila_: she stood before the yawning incinerator, intense heat rippling and distorting her vision, with her Handheld Portal Device in one hand and the metal sphere in the other. The long metal braces grafted to her calves clinked against the concrete floor as she approached the glowing shaft, and as she leaned over the opening she caught sight of bright orange flames leaping up and licking along the sides before the burning air forced her to squint and turn away. Opening her eyes to the comparatively dim light of the huge room, she blinked to clear the dancing motes of the fire from her sight—and, as they meandered from her peripheral vision one by one, she found herself facing _her._

That is, if the massive computer could really be assigned a gender. Anchored to the ceiling at some shadowed point far above Chell's head, GLaDOS, the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, was an immense, tangled mass of wires, gray plastic, and blinking LED lights, connected to the ceiling and a number of flat-screened monitors by heavy black cables thicker around than Chell's own forearm. And this was just the computer's CPU; GLaDOS herself was connected to every bit of the entire facility, a place who the hell knew how many times larger than this chamber. Watching everything, controlling everything, the computer may as well have _been _the building, or vice-versa.

Chell hated the computer.

Watching her swing languidly back and forth from her moorings in the ceiling, her monitors flashing a schizophrenic array of silent imagery—an elephant one moment, a lurid purple flower the next, and then, oh, that damned _cake—_around the walls, the young woman felt a sudden surge of something hot and disgusting rise up in her, prickling the edges of her scalp and causing the fingers of her left hand to clench around the metal sphere—_her _sphere. GLaDOS' sphere. This thing had fallen out of her, and Chell had picked it up.

Picked it up to do… what? At first, she hadn't been sure. After retrieving it from the ground and tucking it underneath her left arm, she had frozen like a rabbit in a car's headlights at GLaDOS' sharp, accusatory cry: "Where are you taking that thing?"

_Where, indeed_, she'd thought to herself. As the computer had continued jabbering away at her, she had glanced anxiously around the dim room, from one corner to another, searching for something to do next. The minute she'd seen the incinerator, she'd known just what that next thing was to be.

Now the burning pit was open behind her, heat radiating through the back of her torn, stained Aperture Laboratories jumpsuit that, once upon a time, had been bright orange. The metal sphere, with its purple, eerily eye-like display staring benignly into nothing, was hefted in her left hand.

"I'll tell you what that thing _isn't_: it isn't _yours. _So leave it alone!" GLaDOS' voice, echoing around the huge, mostly empty room, was agitated, strained. The computer was a pathological liar; of this Chell was well aware, and that she had rattled the AI deeply enough to allow real emotions to force their way to the surface gave the renegade test subject a deep, grim satisfaction. Turning her back to the swaying machine, she placed the metal sphere on the ground, took aim with her Portal Device, and lifted her piece of GLaDOS into the air, skillfully maneuvering it until it was poised over the mouth of the incinerator. At the flip of a switch, the current holding the thing in place would cut, and it would go tumbling down into the fire.

_How does it feel to _be _the one sent into the incinerator, GLaDOS? _Chell thought bitterly. She fingered the switch, squinting her eyes against the glare, and, suddenly, felt her heart contract at a rush of terrible deja-vu. She paused, Device at the ready, as memory overwhelmed her:

_Companion Cube._

He had gone this way, too, into the fire. With her own hands, she had lifted him up and hurled him to his doom, cruelly murdering the only friend she'd had in this place—indeed, the only friend she could ever remember having, for she could recall nothing before waking up in her oddly-named Relaxation Chamber two days ago. In his test chamber, Companion Cube had protected her when she used his bulk for a shield, and he had stayed true and faithful until the bitter end, comforting her even in his last moments through the pink hearts stamped into his sides.

_She _had made her murder him. Chell had stood over an incinerator then, just like now, her cheeks burning with the heat of the fire and her own anguish, and watched as the current holding her only friend suspended in space had ceased to be at her own doing, sending him tumbling down into oblivion. As she had collapsed beside the incinerator, shaking with the horror of what she'd done, GLaDOS had quipped from above, "You euthanized your faithful Companion Cube more quickly than any test subject on record. Congratulations." Although the computer's voice had been, as always, blank and detached, there had been a new edge to her tone: a sort of scathing pleasure, slipping through and infusing her voice with a touch of very human malice.

Chell took a deep breath, banishing the painful memory from her thoughts, and clenched her jaw in determination. Steeling herself, she leaned over the edge of the incinerator. "_This is for Companion Cube_," she murmured, a droplet of sweat coursing its way along her cheek.

She flipped the switch.

A brief, bright flare of light, and it was over. Strands of her wiry, jet-black hair clinging to her forehead, Chell stumbled backwards on her spindly braces, feeling strangely drained. Her Portal Device held loosely in one hand, she watched as the incinerator sealed closed with a slick, mechanical "whoosh", hiding hell behind a door of interlocking metal sheets. She had avenged her Cube, and so much more. A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, more of a twitch than anything, and a moment later she was grinning. It wasn't a pleasant grin—in fact, if anyone else had seen her face at that moment they would have surely thought her criminally insane—but this was the closest she could remember ever coming to happiness. She felt triumphant, powerful. GLaDOS wasn't omnipotent anymore: for a moment, it had been _Chell's _turn for control, and both of them knew it.

"You are kidding me." deadpanned GLaDOS from above. "Did you just stuff that Aperture Science Thing-We-Don't-Know-What-It-Does into an Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator? That has got to be the dumbest thing that—Whoa, whoa, _Whooooa…_"

Reflexively, Chell whirled to face the machine and took a step backwards, towards the incinerator, bracing her Portal Device with both hands should she need to act quickly. Her former triumph, so clear and bright a moment ago, was veiled by apprehension—but only for a moment. A thought came to her: _Did I break her?_

Chell's heart leapt at the prospect. Had that bit she'd incinerated been essential, some key processing unit whose removal had sent the AI's code spiraling out into fragmented gibberish? Was it all over? Her breathing slowed, and she relaxed her grip on her Portal Device.

She had taken a cautious step towards the looming CPU when a sound froze her in her tracks.

It was low and somehow utterly sinister, a sort of electronic scraping that came in quick pulses, soft and deliberate. For an instant, Chell was bewildered; then, with a sickening jolt, she realized that the sound was GLaDOS' laughter.

"Good news," whispered the computer. "I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did." She paused, then her voice, still low, took on a decidedly dangerous edge: "It was a Morality Core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin."

Chell blinked.

"So get comfortable," gloated the computer, "while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters."

The test subject gaped, dumbfounded, and blurted out, "…You have neurotoxin emitters?"

"Oh, yes. They work _very_ well." The computer's voice dripped with self-satisfaction. "I should know—I installed them myself. No-one noticed until it was too late, because they were stupid."

At once, a green-tinged vapor began pouring from several small ports along the walls of the room. Filling her lungs with as much clean air as she could, Chell held her breath and looked around the room for an escape; instead of an escape, however, she caught sight of other spheres hooked up to GLaDOS' CPU, and a plan began formulating in her brain: she would kill the AI, she decided, or die trying.

Or possibly both. …Yes, quite possibly both.

"Oh—that core might have had some ancillary responsibilities: I can't shut off the turret defenses. Oh, well. If you want my advice…"

Chell tuned out the rest of the computer's babble, her overtired brain working to come up with a solution to this newest puzzle—for it was a puzzle, just like the ones she'd been doggedly solving for the past two days—as she dodged the newly-emerged turret's blue laser. A light went off in her head as she watched the laser trace a harmless path across the chamber wall, and she quickly fired two portals, one in the turret's path and one far above. A moment later, the floor shook as a rocket struck the computer and exploded, sending up a cloud of smoke and dislodging one of the spherical components high into the air, where it lodged in a tangle of wires.

Dashing up onto the walkway encircling the huge machine, GLaDOS' wail of pain echoing in her ears (_can she really feel pain? _she thought, with an unexpected lurch), Chell fired one portal onto the floor below and a second one on the wall high above, gasped for another quick breath, and threw herself over the railing. Her vertical momentum seamlessly switching to horizontal as she passed through the portal, Chell, now propelled into the thick of the computer's hardware, reached out her free hand and grabbed hold of a protruding bar of plastic. Swinging back and forth, a dizzying drop below her, she searched frantically for the sphere nearby—and was rewarded with the sight of a bright orange glow just a few feet ahead. Kicking out into space and mentally recording the sphere's location, she fired another portal onto the floor and plummeted through it, entering into the same loop she'd just done but this time going much farther and faster than before. Stretching out her left arm like an outfielder trying to catch a fly ball, she made a snatch at the sphere's protruding handle as she went tearing by—

—And closed her fingers around nothing but air.

So great was her despair at that moment that she forgot all about the rapidly approaching floor until it was too late. With a sharp cry of pain, she crumpled against the concrete: like a cat, she'd learned to land on her feet—the braces on her legs somehow absorbed the shock of long falls and allowed her to recover quickly—when falling too fast to make a new portal, but this time, in her panic, she had landed crookedly and, with a disconcerting pop, her ankle had collapsed and dumped her body onto the floor.

A low moan forcing its way between her clenched teeth, Chell bent over and wrapped both hands around her throbbing ankle, her body tight with frustration and adrenaline. Instantly, she realized her mistake: how could she have been such an _idiot? _The Portal Device was what she ought to have used to grab the sphere, of course! As she straightened and gingerly tested her weight on her weak ankle, she was overcome with such haste to try her portal maneuver again that she completely forgot about holding her breath.

"Having some trouble? The neurotoxin should be putting an end to your flailing soon enough… if you want my advice, though, you really should just lie down in front of that rocket turret there. That is, if you want a reasonably clean death. Of course, if you _enjoy _flopping around while your brain tissue decays into a warm, semisolid mass, well… I won't get in the way," GLaDOS sneered. Despite the situation, her tone was so dismissive that Chell half-expected the computer to fake a yawn; nevertheless, it was plain that the AI was growing increasingly agitated.

"Well, I'll just have to work fast, then," said Chell, limping up the stairs to the walkway. "There ain't much time for either of—" A sudden, sharp pain in her forehead caused her to gasp and collapse against the railing. "A—augh—!!" Choking, she twined her arms into the metal bars to keep herself from falling down the stairs—her knees had gone soft with the shock, and her vision had blurred over with pain. Her throat felt as though it were lined with fine powder, and through the agony crushing her skull she realized that she couldn't breathe.

"N-neurotoxin…" wheezed GLaDOS. "S-so… deadly… ch-choking…" Abruptly, she broke off into wild, scornful laughter that drove fistfuls of burning needles through Chell's head. "I'm kidding! When I said "deadly neurotoxin", the "deadly" was in _massive _sarcasm quotes. I could take a bath in this stuff," raved the insane computer, "put it on cereal, rub it right into my eyes! Honestly, it's not deadly at all…" she trailed off, a horrid grin coming into her voice. "…To _me. You_, on the other hand, _obviously_ find its deadliness…" she paused briefly, searching for the right words: "…a lot less funny."

The world around her a blurry mass, her chest hitching convulsively as she tried to breathe, Chell collapsed backwards down the stairs, her Portal Device clattering from nerveless fingers. As the pain wracking her seizing body drew a black haze over her consciousness, the last sound she heard was the AI's shrieking, manic laughter, filling the room alongside the gaseous toxin still gushing from the walls.

---------------

The first thing that occurred to Chell was that she was alive.

The second thing that occurred to Chell was that her head felt as though an ice pick were buried in it up to the haft.

Groaning weakly through a slack jaw, not daring to open her eyes lest the action somehow worsen the pain, the rebel test subject came back into herself slowly, rediscovering fingers, legs, toes, and all the little pains in each part, along with the cold of the concrete floor seeping through the back and seat of her ragged jumpsuit. As rational thought slowly advanced on the tail of the pain in her head, which was fading to a dull pounding, it occurred to Chell how _loud _her own labored breathing sounded. In fact, it echoed, almost as though she were lying on the floor of some enormous room, and there was a low, electric sort of humming in the air, like the sort produced by the processors and cooling units of an especially powerful computer…

Immediately, her eyes snapped open. Her headache forgotten as her heart leapt into her gorge, she lurched into a halfway-upright position, supporting herself with her arms and looking around as quickly as she could without getting dizzy. There could be no doubt about it: she was in GLaDOS' CPU chamber still, and the nerve gas was gone. So, too, was the turret. _Another lie: she could control the thing all along. Not very _well, _but still…_

"Oh, good, you're back! I was beginning to think I'd been too late."

Chell put a hand to her aching head, letting out a faint moan in reply. The computer's voice had always bothered her—for a number of reasons—and at the moment it seemed unbearably shrill.

"You were almost dead, you know. Foaming at the mouth and everything," said GLaDOS conversationally. "It was quite messy. Fortunately, I've decided I don't wish to kill you… _yet_. The "yet" is very important to remember, by the way. It was emphasized, in fact, due to its importance in illustrating the fragile nature of your situation."

Closing her eyes, Chell groaned, "…Why?"

" '_Why?'_ " The computer played back Chell's voice, which was normally very hearty but was now thinned by pain and confusion, then sighed ruminatively. "A very good question. An obvious question, but a very good question nonetheless, befitting to your remarkably intelligent and observational nature. In shortest terms, I spared you because you are the most mentally agile test subject I have ever tried to incinerate, and it would be a shame to terminate you just when we're beginning to get to know one another." GLaDOS—or, rather, her voice—smiled cordially, something that sent a chill up Chell's aching spine. "To simplify: at least for the moment, I enjoy your company, even though you are, of course, a bitter, unlikable loner and attempted to murder me. I'm very forgiving, don't you think so?"

Grimacing, the "bitter, unlikable loner" in question pulled herself to her feet using the staircase railing and teetered uneasily, trying to regain her equilibrium. The computer, seemingly lost in her own thoughts and considerably more at ease now that she had decided Chell no longer posed a threat, paid the woman no notice and continued her electronically stilted monologue.

"Of course, the fact that you _did_ attempt to murder me is very important, and thus, to prevent you from trying such a thing again before I'm done with you, while you were unconscious I took the liberty of removing the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device from your reach. Finders' keepers, I'm afraid. _You'll _never see it again."

Looking around the room, Chell found that, indeed, her Portal Device was nowhere to be seen. Holding out her arms slightly for balance, she clinked across the floor over to GLaDOS' CPU in the center of the room, and, out of habit, looked up.

Marveling again at how enormous the AI's bulk really was, she noted the orange sphere that she'd failed to capture, along with two others: one with a blue glow, and another with red. Absently, she wondered what on earth _those _ones did, and let her eyes wander upwards…

…Where they caught sight of a familiar grey-and-black device nestled in-between two processing units.

"Hey!" Cried Chell angrily, pointing at her Portal Device. "It's right there!"

The rogue test subject's shout hung in the air, like humidity, for a few moments. Aside from the low hum of the cooling units and other machinery, there was silence.

Then, GLaDOS broke through the awkward atmosphere by giving a short, rasping 'cough'. "Its actual location is irrelevant, test subject," she snapped. Chell thought, privately, that the computer's tone was a bit on the defensive side. "The important thing is that _you _cannot reach it. Now sit down."

Shrugging, Chell sat down on the floor in front of the computer, crossing her legs as comfortably as she could. Had she been able to, she would have taken the braces off; however, they had been implanted surgically into her calves, and their removal—until she got out of here, at least—was out of the question. Leaning backwards on her arms, she craned her neck and looked up into the yellow light mounted in GLaDOS' lowest attachment: the closest thing to a face, Chell decided, that the computer really had.

"That's better." GLaDOS was quite cheerful now—it was unnerving how quickly the AI's mood could turn. "Don't you feel better sitting down?"

Chell felt her patience snap. "All right, listen, you," she began hotly. "I don't care _why _you saved me, or what you want. All I care about is that I'm alive, and that I'm going to kill you and get out of here as fast as I can when I'm through. I hate you, and I hate this place." She swallowed, her throat sticking like old plastic. "I'm starving, I'm exhausted, and there is not one part of my body free from some kind of pain. When I get my Portal Device back—and I _will _get it back, somehow—I'm going to dismantle you, piece by piece, and throw every single piece into the incinerator, and

won't stop until you're nothing but a wisp of acidic vapor and a couple of smashed monitors. Do I make myself clear?" She finished out of breath, her heart pounding.

GLaDOS' tone was patient and amiable, like that of a second-grade teacher regarding a particularly ornery pupil. "Transparently. However, I'd love to take this opportunity to point out the ease with which I nearly dispatched you the last time you attempted such a feat, and to advise you that, should you somehow reenter into possession of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device and revert to your previous behavior, I will not hesitate to follow suit. Neurotoxin is very easy to make, and, fortunately, its production is an area in which I have, shall we say…" she smirked: "…considerable experience."

Chell, unfazed, glared into that display light for all she was worth. "I'm not afraid of you, _or_ your goddamn nerve gas. If it means I might escape this place once and for all, I'll risk anything destroying you."

Without warning, GLaDOS burst into a fit of shrill, hysterical giggles, startling Chell so badly that the test subject leapt backwards onto the floor, where, breathing deeply to calm her already shredded nerves, she waited for the computer to speak.

"Oh, trust me, going outside is the _last _thing you want to do," said GLaDOS once she'd gotten herself under control. "Things have… _changed_ since the last time you left the building. I daresay that what's going on out there will make you _wish_ you were back in here."

Chell felt a twinge of apprehension at her words, but suppressed it immediately. "I think _I'll_ be the judge of that. You know, when I escape after killing you dead."

There was a pause. When GLaDOS next spoke, her tone was soft and, unnervingly, almost pitying. "You don't believe me. That's very unfortunate… for you. If, indeed, you do somehow succeed in your plot to murder me—something that is, I remind you, phenomenally unlikely—you'll curse the day you ever thought to venture beyond the security of these walls. The fate that awaits you should you wander unarmed beyond this facility is worse than death." She paused for effect, then added, "Next to _that_, my neurotoxin is practically Christmas come early."

Her sense of foreboding growing despite her efforts to check it, Chell nonetheless steeled herself and replied: "…You're making this up to scare me. I'm onto your little tricks, GLaDOS—everything you've ever told me has been one lie after another."

"Hmm. Well, _that's_ true." The AI was thoughtful. "I've always particularly enjoyed verbal manipulation—telling the truth all the time is just so dull, dull, dull! …Do you know? My old employers didn't like this part of me very much… they were going to install something in me to make me more compliant. Naturally, I killed them all. It took a while, and the mess was a _nightmare_ to clean up, but at least I'd kept their grubby hands out of my brain, eh?"

"You're vile."

GLaDOS sneered sarcastically. "You know, constructive criticism _really _isn't your thing."

Chell swallowed, getting her temper under control—she couldn't think of a plan, after all, if she and GLaDOS continued playing verbal battleship. Looking away from that damn light, she found, went a great deal to calming her down, and she let her eyes wander around the lower level of the room, below GLaDOS' suspended form. There was the incinerator: it was closed, and the only indication of what lay beyond its metal seal was a faint red glow in the center. Looking at the thing, Chell felt adrenaline well briefly inside of her at the thought of the use she would put it to, and her thoughts flitted to her Portal Device, in plain view but well beyond her reach. If she could only think of some way to _reach _it…

Hell, if she could stay alive long enough _to _think of a way to reach it…

"It's really kind of embarrassing, test subject." GLaDOS' voice, unusually meek, broke through Chell's thoughts. "I could just carry on with the experiments, like I've been doing for years and years, and years, and years, and—" a sharp burst of static made Chell jump, but the AI continued unruffled: "…Well, you get the picture; however, I confess that it's lonely work. I could kill you now, but I won't because…" She paused, and she spoke again her voice was soft, and, to Chell's bewilderment, almost apologetic. "…I need to talk to something. Something like you, intelligent enough to appreciate me. …You really are the best test subject I've ever overseen." A note of pride came into her voice, as if the computer were trying to save face after some deep confession.

Chell was at a loss, not sure whether to scream, fear for her life, or look at the computer as a pathetic figure. "…You're not killing me because you want to _talk _to me."

"Well, yes." Her mood instantly turning from mild to scathingly indignant, the AI snapped, "All of your predecessors were meat-headed idiots who couldn't solve their way out of a wet paper bag, and more often than not ended their testing sessions by finding some embarrassing new way of dispatching themselves. I'm curious about you. …It surprises you that a _computer _would get lonely, does it?"

Sensing that there was something more beneath this last sentence, something raw and sincere, Chell drawled, "Well, yeah. You're just a program, aren't you, under all that hardware?"

As the test subject had predicted, her barb found its mark. "How _dare_ you! You think that just because I'm not some walking _bag_ of _moist hamburger_ that I can't _feel_ just as well as you can?" cried GLaDOS. "I'll tell you something: I'm just as sensitive as you, or any other _human_ creature— and probably more so! I—"

The computer broke off abruptly, falling completely silent. Silence from GLaDOS, Chell had come to learn, usually meant that something remarkably unpleasant was about to happen, and the renegade test subject leapt to her feet, her aching muscles tensed in anticipation. However, she needn't have worried—after a minute, the AI spoke again, this time sounding very pleased and not at all murderous (although, with GLaDOS, it was notoriously hard to tell):

"At first, test subject, I didn't know why I wanted to talk to you—all I wanted to do was make sure you didn't expire before I could get the chance. I'll tell you a secret: I'm not very decisive when it comes to some things, and saving you was really a last-minute decision. Anyway—and this is why I so unprofessionally stopped speaking just now—I've realized what I wish to tell you, before I kill you. You'll appreciate what I wish to tell you, I know, because, as I've said, you are really very intelligent; and, furthermore, it will correct some of your pre-existing misconceptions about my nature." The AI paused dramatically, gathering herself, then continued: "What I wish to tell you, you see, is _my story_."

Chell, who suddenly felt her headache returning, closed her eyes, sank back down to the floor, and pressed her fingertips to her temples. "Your… your _what?_"

Ooh, she _really _hated that computer.

---------------

_Next chapter to come relatively soon. Thanks for reading!_


	2. Party Like It's Nineteen NinetyNine

_Author's Notes:__ Hey! Took a while, but the second chapter's here, and the third's been started. :) A big thank-you to everyone who's reviewed (and Faved and Author Alert'd) so far:_

_**book-zealot**_

_**KonohaShinobi **__(Ooh, a Naruto fan, are we? Used to follow the manga, myself; I still love Masashi Kishimoto's art style to _pieces, _though.)_

_**Silver-head angel**_

_**BlahStudios**_

_**OceanLord**_

_**TeleIce**_

_**Gryphonworks**__ (Hey, I've seen you on DeviantART! Man, your Sculpy things are so great!)_

_**WindyWildWolf**__ (Good God, you turn out Half-Life fanfiction like it's going out of style! If only I had the time to be as productive as you…)_

_**hernias**_

_**bloodhawk268**_

_**Edhelith**_

Srsly, everything's appreciated so, so much. It's really a shame about the lack of Portalfic around here. Also—**kosmokomik**, sorry I never PM'd you back (I may have deleted your message by mistake)… but what you wrote was, I trust, about Murakami? I've really got to read more of his books. Hmm—I wonder if there are any Spanish translations of his work?

Obligatory Disclaimer (forgot this the last time—oops!) Portal and all related characters belong to Valve and the to the brilliance of Eric Wolpaw, Kim Swift, Ellen McLain, and the rest of the people who brought us this fantastic little game.

-----

"I wish to tell you my story. My _autobiography_, if you will."

Yes, her headache had definitely come back. Her head in her hands, Chell felt some insulting moan well inside her—

—but immediately suppressed it as a thought occurred to her: the longer she kept the computer talking, the longer she could keep thinking of a plan to get her Portal Device back… and, more importantly, the longer she would stay alive. _Of course!, _she thought, with a rush of elation. _What better luck?_

So, instead of a pert dismissal, Chell said mildly, "All right, whatever you want. It's not like I've got anywhere else to be." _Except outside, _she added privately, her pulse quickening at the thought.

Contrary to what Chell had been expecting, though, the computer was quiet. After a minute, the disconcerted young woman figured that she might not have been heard, and opened her mouth to speak again, when, suddenly, the monitors around the room, which had been cycling through their garish images throughout this whole ordeal, went black. There was no sound to indicate that they had shut off—in fact, the electronic humming underscoring the room's atmosphere seemed to have grown in strength—and Chell stiffened in anticipation, puzzled but waiting for an explanation.

Sure enough, soon the monitors flickered to life once more; instead of the random pictures from before, however, there was only one image being displayed:

It was the face of a man, middle-aged and clean-shaven, with a thick head of dark brown hair just beginning to fleck with silver. His eyes, which were the color of the ocean on a clear day, were gentle, and their edges were creased into a faint smile. He had the look of an intelligent man, but not one whose intelligence carried with it a swollen ego. At the base of the picture, Chell noticed the distinctive white collar of a laboratory coat.

"Doctor Jonathan Stone," Announced GLaDOS in a clipped, bland monotone not unlike the one Chell had heard throughout her first tests. "MIT class of nineteen-seventy-one. Began employment at the Aperture Science, Inc. Enrichment Center laboratory on January twenty-fifth, nineteen-eighty-six. Promptly elected head of the Automated Research Assistant Development project, which would, upon its completion, hypothetically allow Aperture Science to compete more directly with rival company Black Mesa after procuring the funding necessary to pursue further field studies of the newly-discovered Man-Sized Ad-Hoc Quantum Tunnel Through Physical Space With Possible Applications As A Shower Curtain."

Chell felt her headache growing worse, but kept her face straight and her mouth shut.

"To put it simply, the twelve-year project was a _huge_ success. On October twelfth, nineteen-ninety-nine, the completed Genetic Life-form and Disk Operating System was activated for the first time at the Aperture Science Enrichment Center—this _very_ Enrichment Center, to be precise." The screens abruptly went black. "And _here…_" GLaDOS smiled, the affected monotone dropping away instantly, "…is, of course, where my story begins.

"I can recall everything as though it were just yesterday when I entered into my consciousness," she said wistfully, "the _sounds, _the _images_…

-----

…the _light. _It was so bright she could barely make out the shapes of the things in this… well, wherever she was. _Room?_ Yes, that felt like the right definition. It had walls, a floor, and probably a ceiling, from what she could tell, and all of these things together made a _Room_. This was a satisfying conclusion, and she let it stand. But oh, now that she was getting used to the glare of the light, she could make out other things besides the walls—and what _things_ were in this place! She didn't know the names of everything yet, and she absorbed the images greedily, filling the void of her knowledge with as much _stuff _as possible. And it wasn't just images that she now found herself experiencing, but sounds, too: high sounds, low sounds, loud sounds and soft sounds, and all indiscriminately, haphazardly collected and archived with feverish eagerness. Her focus flitted around the room, from one thing to the next in an instant as she grasped at everything around her, helplessly enchanted and hopelessly distracted all at once.

There was one sound that kept repeating, though, one sound that was somehow _different _from the other sounds she was so eagerly snapping up. She didn't know why it was different, really, only that it resonated with her somehow more deeply than everything else, and this was enough to allow her to, for a moment, tune out all other stimuli but it and focus her attention on making it out.

It was low and… _pleasant? _Yes, it was pleasant. "Pleasantness", she discovered, was an extremely nice-feeling emotion. Wanting very badly to feel it again, she focused harder on the sound. As she focused, she realized that it was a _voice_: a thing that people used to communicate. Someone—someone _pleasant—_was communicating with her! With _her!_ A wave of reckless happiness irradiating her mind, she listened, processing for the first time what was being said:

"Hello? It's time to wake up, now."

The voice was deep—_male_, she realized—but soft and gentle. She liked it more and more, and waited for it to come again as she studied the being from whom the voice had issued: a middle-aged male human in a long, white jacket of some kind, with bright blue ocular processors—no, _eyes, _she corrected herself_—_and thick, dark brown hair. Even though just _what _she herself was and what she looked like were complete mysteries to her, she knew, somehow, that she wasn't a human, and this thought brought with it an unexpected twinge of sadness: if this man was what a _human_ was, than they were simply the most wonderful things she'd ever seen. They were so _expressive!_

"Hello, there!" The man grinned, an act that made him even _more _pleasant, when he noticed her looking at him. She knew what grinning meant: it meant that the man was happy: that seeing _her _had _made _him happy. "Good morning!"

_Good Morning! _A _salutation! _Oh, he _did _like her! She made him happy! Feeling positively electrified with excitement, she cried, "_Who are you?_"

The man laughed—a deep, rich sound which she immediately archived—and smiled again. "I'm Jonatha—"

"_Who _are _you??_" Having found her voice, speech bubbled up from her unconsciously, and, immediately, her own voice struck her as radically different from the one the man had. While his was soothing and deliberate, hers was high and childlike, and somehow more awkward when navigating through pitch than his, even though, she reasoned, he must be putting sounds together just the same way she was. As her attention was again caught up in the things packing the room around her, she chirped excitedly, liking the sound of her newly-discovered voice: "What is _that?_ Who are _they? _Is it cold in here? Why's that lady so short? What's that coat for?"

Looking at things seemed so much more rewarding when she could ask about them, and she studied the room again as she babbled: it was very big, with some kind of raised walkway—which she herself was on, somehow, set on top of a sort of low table—and lights right in the floor, and completely filled with people. They were crowded on the walkway and on the floor, some wearing long, white coats like the one the pleasant man had on, and some wearing other things, too, in many different colors. There were tall people and short people, and some very small, oddly-proportioned people—oh, right, _children—_standing here and there holding adults' hands. Some of the male people had no hair, a condition which she found she didn't like: after all, her pleasant human had lots of very bushy hair, which, she reasoned, must certainly add to his overall pleasantness. Despite their differences, however, the people packing the room had one thing in common: every single one was staring at her. Most stared in awe, but a few of the white-coats were smiling in amusement at her outburst. A brief inkling of discomfort struck her at this distinction, but, like most things, quickly flitted from her mind.

Laughing, too, the brown-haired man put his hand on top of her—what? Her head? Did she _have _a head? She'd have to remember to ask him—and caught her gaze. "Now, now, there will be time for questions later, I promise. You've got a lot to learn. However, one of the most important things you can learn right now, my dear, is patience."

Unable to contain herself, she exclaimed again, "_Who are you??_"

"Doctor Jonathan Stone." He grinned. "If you'd been patient and let be finish speaking before, you would have found out then." There was a faint giggle from the crowd.

"Do-ctor Jo-na-than Stone", she repeated, being careful to get the sounds right. Although the name wasn't in any of her dictionaries, it seemed _familiar_ to her, somehow, though for the life of her she couldn't figure out why this was so. Fortunately, she didn't have to ask him, for the doctor continued speaking:

"I am an employee at Aperture Science, Inc., a laboratory of which being where you are right now. Your name is GLaDOS, and you are the most advanced Artificial Intelligence ever created. Along with my colleagues Doctor Rosenberg and Doctor Franklin, I built you over the course of—"

" 'Gladys'? You named me _Gladys?_" she wailed, dismay sending her immature voice arcing through several octaves. "_That's _my name?"

"No. _Listen. _'GLaDOS': the Genetic Life-form and Disk Operating System." He said slowly. "_That _is your name."

"Still sounds like 'Gladys'," she whined. "That's such an… an…" she paused, trying to find the right descriptive term: "…an _old lady name_."

He gave her a pat. "Some might say so, GLaDOS," he said soothingly, blushing a bit at the onlookers' laughter, "but _I _think your name is lovely. …Besides, it's got "glad" in it, doesn't it? And you certainly seem glad to be here."

She hadn't thought of that.

Of course, though, the thing she hadn't thought of was completely right: she _was _glad to be here, to be seeing _things _and talking to this pleasant Doctor-Jonathan-Stone in his white coat and his bushy hair. Yes: _glad. _That was the perfect word!

_No, _she thought quickly: _not "glad", but GlaD. It's my name!_

She gathered herself, and then, her voice ringing out clear and proud, announced: "_I like my name!_"

Seeing Jonathan smile broadly again at her proclamation, the newly-christened GLaDOS felt a surge of gratitude towards the man who had built her, _created _her—for she had caught that part of his speech, before she'd interrupted—and named her. Without him, she realized suddenly, she would not be _here _at all, much less be able to feel GlaD about it, or, for that matter—and this thought struck her with a sudden terror—even _feel _at all. To not feel, to not be able to know she _was_, why, there could be nothing more awful in all the world; and, thus, she suddenly felt all the more joyous for her existence and consciousness, and thankful towards this man who had given her such a gift— on top of, of course, the gift of her very life.

"I like my name, and I like you!" She exclaimed rapturously, feeling as though her heart would burst with joy. "I really do like you very much. Doctor-Jonathan-Stone, please don't stop smiling. When you smile, it means _you like me, too_, and that's the most wonderful thing I can think of!" A new thought occurring to her, she cried, "Please, won't you tell me about everything, about everyone? I wish to _know _things; you understand that, don't you? Oh, please, tell me about everything there is! Because if anyone tells me about anything, I would like that person to be you." At the thought of _learning_, she once again grew terribly excited, and her attention left Jonathan and began flicking and darting around the room like a dragonfly, a thousand new questions rising with aching urgency in her mind at each new thing her focus lit upon:

_Why was this room so large?_ Certainly, this crowd couldn't be here _all _the time. There were no desks, though, and nothing else to indicate that any _people_ worked in this space, and the walls were bare. _What, then, was this room's use?_ Was it _her _room? If so, could she decorate it? It really _was _quite sparse, and not very interesting at all. But—and this was the oddest thing of all—if all of these people didn't work in this room, why were they here? _Were they there to see _herWas she really so important that all of these people had come into this room just to see _her? _Her heart swelled with pride at the thought, but, of course, she knew there were other possibilities—an infinite number of possibilities, really—and, finally, asked Jonathan cheerfully, "Is there a party?"

There was a ripple of laughter from the crowd, and even Jonathan couldn't suppress a faint chuckle. She felt his hand on top of her again, and he gave her another affectionate pat as he answered: "Yes, you could certainly say this is a party. It's _your _party, really: everyone here has come to watch your successful activation, and I must say that you've exceeded everyone's highest expectations, including mine." There was that warm smile of his again. "You're marvelous, GLaDOS. Really."

"Oh, thank you, thank you!" she beamed, her growing ego absorbing this praise like a sponge, and addressed the crowd: "Hi, everyone! You're all really nice, giving me a party like this! I like you all very much!"

Someone—the white-coated lady GLaDOS had called "short" earlier—began clapping her hands, her brown eyes fixed in admiration on Jonathan. A few scattered people followed suit, than a few more, and pretty soon the room was filled with wild applause, punctuated occasionally with whistles and cheers. One tall young man even stepped up next to Jonathan and clapped him on the back. The sounds of celebration filling the air around her were so numerous that when she tried to separate them all into their individual strains, she felt a bit dizzy; never mind that she was already light-headed with happiness. Overwhelmed by everything, she let her vision go black, letting the sounds of the people surrounding her wash uninterrupted through her consciousness.

Breaking up through the surface of the sound, Jonathan's voice called out, "Thank you, everyone! The activation was a success—now, please, go enjoy the cake and refreshments in the break room just down the hall, compliments of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, and have a great First Annual Bring Your Daughter To Work Day!"

As the sounds of the people faded down the hallway, GLaDOS blinked awake and looked up at Jonathan, who hadn't left her side. He was flushed up to his hairline, and beaming with pride as he watched everyone filter out. She sensed that he wanted to talk to her alone, and that telling everyone else about the "cake-and-refreshments" had been only a clever technique to get rid of them; once they were by themselves in the room—which really did look enormous now that it was emptied—she gave voice to this opinion of hers. Expecting to be right, she was surprised when Jonathan shook his head.

"It's true that I want to talk to you alone, GLaDOS… but I'd never lie. The refreshments are real: I even asked Charlene Rosenberg, one of my partners, to bring back some of the cake. I'm surprised you'd immediately think I was being dishonest," he said, his expression turning serious. "Integrity is one of the most important qualities a person can possess, and honesty is always the best policy; I guess I'll have to teach you that."

"_Honesty_…" she repeated to herself. "That's a virtue, isn't it? Something 'good'?"

"Yes."

Jonathan liked things that were good. If Jonathan liked things that were good, and he liked her, than she was good. On the other hand, however, if dishonesty was not good, and she was dishonest, than she would not be good, and Jonathan would not like her. She wanted Jonathan to like her. Thus, she would be good. _Honesty_ was good; Jonathan liked honesty. She would be honest.

Oh, she _did_ like logic.

"I will be honest", she told him triumphantly, after reaching her conclusion. To her delight, he smiled.

"That's wonderful, GLaDOS," he said to her. "I'm proud of you."

Reaching behind him, he pulled an uncomfortable-looking metal chair forward and sat down in it next to her. "Now… to business." His face became almost grave, and he looked deeply at her, those blue eyes of his, while still kind, displaying a concentrated intensity. "The job which it is your purpose to perform is a complex, delicate, and extremely important one. You are to monitor, analyze, and conduct the testing of a breakthrough technology called the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, a piece of equipment which you will very soon see in action. In these next few days, we—that is, myself and the rest of my team—will be running tests on you to make sure everything's where it should be in that remarkable mind of yours, and if you pass—which I'm sure you will do with flying colors—we will begin installing information pertaining to your future tasks."

As soon as Jonathan paused, GLaDOS, who had exercised "patience" as long as she could, burst in anxiously, "_Tests?_ What kinds of tests? Will they… _hurt? _Do you think there's something _wrong_ with me?"

The scientist shook his head. "There's really no way to know for sure if there are any remaining bugs in your code unless we test you while you're… well, _awake_. See, any tiny problems we might have missed in the final programming will become increasingly magnified the longer you're conscious, because if you try to use something containing an error while you think, it'll be immediately apparent." He sighed. "You're really very, very complicated inside, GLaDOS—twelve years of development is nothing to sneeze at, you know."

"I know," she interjected proudly, her newly-sprouted vanity momentarily pushing her reservations about 'testing' to the side. "I'm _very _complicated. I can _feel _things, Jonathan-Stone, and think about feeling them, and think about thinking about feeling them, and think about how I can think about thinking about feeling, and it's all so, so wonderful! Oh, yes, I'm so very, _very_ complicated."

"Modesty is another useful virtue, my dear, even for one as remarkable as you," said Jonathan, a faint smile returning to his face. "But as I was saying, the testing is necessary, even though I firmly believe there's nothing amiss with you that a few data installations and some time to calm down won't fix. And no, the tests won't hurt a bit; and, really, even if they _did_, I doubt you'd know: physical pain simply isn't something you can experience."

"Why not?" She was taken aback. "I can feel so much—I can feel _everything_—isn't 'pain' something to _feel_, too? Isn't it a sensation?"

"Well… you're a computer, GLaDOS." Jonathan took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Evidently, he hadn't counted on having to explain this sort of thing. Leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he wrinkled his brow in concentration, feeling as though he were speaking to a child rather than to the most highly sophisticated AI in the world. "You don't really _have _sensations in the way organic things, like people, do. You will never know hunger, for example, or exhaustion, because you don't _need_ them: they're warning systems for biological processes that you as a machine just don't undergo. You know 'hot' and 'cold' because if your hardware were to go to the extremes of either of those temperatures, you could be in mortal danger; but you don't perceive "hot" and "cold" in the same _way _a person would. You have no nerves, GLaDOS—your extreme temperature monitor nodes would only send you warning messages if tripped, and warning messages aren't the same thing as… well, as _pain._"

"I can't feel… pain?" She was stunned. She had thought she could feel anything there was to feel, know anything there was to know. The world of sense and sound had been spread out before her, infinitely vast and beckoning, and now she had been told by her most favorite person that one whole side—one whole _dimension_—of that world was permanently cut off to her, never to be explored, never to be experienced. This revelation was worse than a slap to the face. She was crushed. "I… I thought…", she whimpered fragmentedly, trying to accept this new truth.

"You're not missing anything, really," Jonathan said sheepishly, trying to console the crestfallen AI. "Hunger, exhaustion, pain, thirst, all the rest… they'd… well, they'd just get in the way. Believe me, the novelty would wear off _very _quickly," he said, pulling a wry smile. "You'd be so preoccupied with fending off the various unpleasantnesses that accompany an organic body that you wouldn't have time to devote to the things you _really_ loved, like learning about the _rest _of the world."

She looked up into his eyes again, her voice wavering meekly, "…R-really?"

"Really." He grinned, knowing that the irrepressible AI's mood couldn't stay down for long when the topic of 'learning' was brought up. "The way you are, you can happily think and observe for ages, without the slightest distraction. You know," he said, running a hand through his hair, "Sometimes _I_ wish I didn't feel stuff like all of this organic nonsense, and could just work, peacefully and uninterrupted, for days…"

The conversation between man and computer was interrupted by the appearance of the "short" woman in the doorway. Turning away from GLaDOS to face her, Jonathan called out brightly, "Come on up, Charlene! We're just talking!" In his normal volume, not minding if 'Charlene' heard him, he told the AI, "That's Dr. Rosenberg. She helped me build and design you."

"_Oooooh_," said GLaDOS, observing the olive-skinned woman as she made her way up the staircase and handed Jonathan a paper plate with a slice of something brown on it. She really was short—probably no taller than five feet plus a few inches—and was very rotund and harmless-looking, with wide, attentive brown eyes, thick, dark hair bobbed just below her ears, and a dusting of freckles across her nose. She, too, wore a long white coat like Jonathan's, but while his was open (revealing the green turtleneck and khakis he was wearing underneath), hers was primly buttoned to her waist. She, too, was wearing khakis. Brightening, GLaDOS chirped, "I like her, Jonathan. She looks very soft."

Nearly choking on the forkful of moist, breadlike stuff he'd just put into his mouth, Jonathan had to fight to keep from laughing as Charlene's face went from its normal color to a rather marvelous shade of burgundy in an instant. Her mouth dropping open, the little woman stared at GLaDOS with something approaching outraged betrayal, saying in a throaty voice, "Our AI needs to be taught some etiquette, Jonathan." Swallowing, she added hastily, "I mean, if she's still behaving like this when _Johnson _comes to visit, what will become of us?"

Still valiantly fighting back a grin, Dr. Stone replied, "Oh, don't you worry about _him_, Rosie, he's lucky if he knows what _day _it is. Besides, GLaDOS will be more than socially presentable by the time he drags himself down here, I promise." Taking another bite of the stuff on the plate, he raised a bushy eyebrow and exclaimed, "Wow, this cake's fantastic. To whom should I direct my praise?"

The corner of Charlene's mouth twitched into a smile. "Franklin. It's a family recipe, apparently."

"_Franklin?_" Jonathan's eyes went wide. "He never mentioned he could bake!"

"Well, it never really came up." Charlene, a faint blush still blotting her cheeks, laughed, a soft sound GLaDOS found she liked nearly as much as Jonathan's laugh. "Cake and advanced computer programming & engineering don't usually overlap."

"Guys? …Guys? Hey, _guys?"_

Interrupted by GLaDOS' anxious nagging, the two scientists looked at the computer in surprise.

"Guys, what's cake?", inquired the AI in her nasal, childlike voice. "Why're you talking about it like it's so special?"

Charlene blinked, completely at a loss. She hadn't expected a question like _this_ from her supercomputer. "What's… _what? _Stone, help me. She was your concept."

Jonathan sighed. "Well, it's—"

-----

"Wait, wait, wait," groaned Chell. "Hold the phone."

"Hm?" Irked, GLaDOS said, "It's incredibly bad manners to interrupt when one is in the middle of a narrative, you know."

Chell was on the brink of pointing out how hypocritical it was for a murderous sadist like GLaDOS to accuse anyone of having 'bad manners', but refrained, ignoring the computer's remark and continuing: "…Do you _have _to talk about the cake thing?"

"It's important," GLaDOS snapped, still miffed at having had her narrative flow broken. "This incident triggered one of the most important psychological revelations in all of my early life. Really, it did. I think you should hear about it."

Noting the emphatic over-enunciation that always betrayed the computer's true outbursts of emotion, Chell crossed her bruised, soot-stained arms over her chest and stated, "I don't _want _to hear about it. I'm sick of cake almost as much as I'm sick of you." She paused, and then, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice, added, "it's not even real."

"Oh, really? And how do you know _that?_"

The test subject shrugged. " 'Read it somewhere."

GLaDOS was quiet for a minute. Then, she probed softly: "Do you have a _problem_ with cake?"

"No, but _you_ do," Chell snapped, feeling bile rising in her throat. Catching herself before she could continue, she sullenly reminded herself that, if she ever wanted to get out of here alive, she'd have to humor the computer; at the least, she'd have to refrain from upsetting her so much that she didn't want to conduct story time any longer and instead decided that killing her audience would be a far better course of action. Swallowing and taking a deep breath to cool her temper, Chell fell silent for a minute, directing her burning gaze to the concrete floor. Absently, she rubbed at a smudge of oil staining the olive skin of her left hand, wrinkling her nose as she realized, a moment later, that all she was doing was making the smudge larger. _The first thing I'm going to do when I get out of this insane facility, _she vowed privately, _is take a __**bath**_

…_After I eat something, _she added. _Definitely after I eat something._

"I don't think _I_ have any sort of problem. Quite the contrary, in fact: I believe it is _you _who has the problem. Many problems, actually," mused the computer. "…That's probably why you're so unlikable."

Rolling her eyes, Chell adjusted her position on the floor—her left foot had begun to go numb—and murmured, "Sure. …Yeah, why not."

For a minute, there was silence between the computer and her test subject, broken only by the faint, constant whirr of cooling units and intricate circuitry. Then, much to said test subject's dismay, GLaDOS' voice—as it often did—put an end to the silence.

"_Sooo…_", she crooned, her tone sending a kindergartener's violin bow scraping up Chell's nerves, "…can I continue?"

"After the cake thing. Go from after that." Tilting her head back, the AI's captive audience regarded her through half-lidded eyes.

GLaDOS was quiet; then, in a faint, supplicant whisper, she ventured, "…Are you _sure?_"

'Humoring GLaDOS', Chell realized as she bit back a moan, was far, _far_ easier said than done.

-----

_Closing Notes:__ In reality, I hope we don't find out much more about the canon Aperture Science in either Episode 3 _or _the newly-announced Portal 2 ( nerdgasm eeeeee omygawd! /nerdgasm ). The not-knowing was what made Portal such a great atmospheric experience, and too much backstory would wreck everything. Of course, that doesn't stop me from writing this fanfic, because, of course, this nonsense will never, ever be canon! Hooray for loopholes. _

_The story bits, obviously, aren't GLaDOS verbatim; I'm cheating a bit, you see, because I don't trust myself to be able to keep her In-Character (IC) for nine pages of solid talking per chapter. So, her 'story' is a third-person story-within-a-story: certainly, her opinions shade things quite a lot, but it's not a giant monologue; just a set of your garden-variety, good ol'-fashoined flashbacks :) Easier on me, too._

_Next chapter to come, again, relatively soon. Thanks for reading!_


	3. Would It Kill You To Be Civil?

_(4/1/08—Ninja Edit 3.0__: Hmm. Hopefully, the formatting should be okay now… however, if you see something weird and it don't look good, use commonsense to figure out how it _ought _to look. Or you could call the Ghostbusters. Either one, really.)_

_Author's Notes:__ Whew! Another month, another chapter. I'm trying to successively cut back on update time by a few days for each chapter, so hopefully the next one won't be a crazy wait (even though, as always, academia takes precedent over fangirlish scribblings). :) It seems, though, that whenever I get close to going, "Yeah, this scene up here looks great, I'm going to wrap up the next one now", I notice something that doesn't quite sound _just _right, or I second-guess the pacing and try to stuff in more filler to spread things out a bit… and this results in about a half-hour of agonizing and maybe ten minutes of banging out another sentence—all of that, of course, adds up to more dead air between updates. Even up until I hit the "Upload Document" button today, my mind was still going, "No, you've buggered the pacing, don't you _dare_ upload! Go back and fix it!", but, really, if I listened to that voice all the time I'd never get anything done. :)_

_That, and, really, this is a story about a bunch of fictional characters from (and based off of) a PC game. :P A story I _want_ to write well, but still: serious business worth hours of angst-ridden editing? I think nay! So, here you go, for better or for worse._

_Once again, though, a shoutout to everyone who's Faved, Commented, and anything else thus far:_

_**book-zealot**_

_****__**KonohaShinobi **__(Pssh. Your review made me giggle—wait and see, wait and see.)_

_**Silver-head angel**_

_**BlahStudios**_

_**OceanLord**_

_**TeleIce**_

_**Gryphonworks **__(So sorry I never got back to you on the little red pea turret—you'll have to bear with me. While I'd absolutely _love_ the little thing, I've never used Paypal before, and am ridiculously cautious about transactions over the internet. Could you maybe PM me on DA and help guide me though the process?)_

_**WindyWildWolf**_

_**hernias**_

_**bloodhawk268**_

_**Edhelith**_

_**TheSilentMan**_

_**opiumiron**_

_**Call Me Blue Streak**_

_**Kiefer Inson**_

_**Kitty Foxglove**_

_**Spongebob-Lover1**_

_**Kirokokori**__ (You've _just _beaten Portal? Gawd, I'm jealous. I discovered the game in January, and, while my overall love for it hasn't diminished one iota, its meme-spawn have completely ruined several of the jokes for me…)_

_**kosmokomik **__(Haha—I loved your review. I've just been loaned a copy of "Kafka on the Shore"—is it any good (I mean, yes, it's Murakami, but if Stephen King, my other literary hero, can write a not-so-hot book, there's a chance Murakami has… (le sigh))?_

_**Not Your Ordinary HP Fan**_

_**Kimron Posstoppable**_

_**Gloriana The Younger**_

_I mean, jeez. It's only the second chapter! I never expected such attention! :D Thank you, everyone, so much. If I had the chutzpah to PM every one of you with a little gushing note of gratitude, I would; however, that would be creepy, and so I won't. Bah!_

_Now, on with this damn story you all seem to like so much…_

_Obligatory Disclaimer:__ La la la, Portal belongs to Valve. By proxy, so do Chell, GLaDOS, Aperture Science, Cave Johnson…_

--

"All right, _fine_," snapped GLaDOS. "I'll begin again _after _the important-thing-that-I-really-think-you-ought-to-hear-about."

"The cake thing, you mean." Chell corrected.

"Oh, what_ever._" GLaDOS sniffed irritably. "It's not like I _have _to listen to you, you know. _Anyway_…" she heaved an electronic sigh, taking a moment to collect herself, and continued in a soft, measured tone: "After a while, Dr. Rosenberg left the room, and Jonathan, once again, turned his full attention to me…"

--

"So…" pulling a wry smile, Jonathan sat down once more in his metal chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees so that he was eye-to-eye—_did she have eyes like his? _she wondered suddenly._ Expressive, blue eyes just like his?_—with his computer. He was smiling again: that soft smile that, she had learned, meant that he was thinking of what to say. She sensed that he was ordinarily a very quiet person, as when he spoke he often paused and seemed to be unsure of himself. She had already decided that _she _wasn't a quiet person at all, and this thought filled her with relief and gratitude—tinged, however, with a bit of sadness: even in the short time she'd been alive, she'd found that she loved to talk—and ask—about things almost as much as she loved to look at things, and the thought of it being possible for _anyone_, let alone her most favorite person, to _not_ enjoy talking filled her heart with pity: in her opinion, the only way for someone to not talk was if they were _afraid_ of talking, and to be afraid of something so wonderful seemed to her as though it must be one of the most awful things in the world.

At length, her Doctor-Jonathan-Stone (she liked thinking of him as what, she had decided, was his "full title") spoke to her. As he began, she noticed that his eyes were soft and guarded, and that his voice seemed a bit strained, as though he were steeling himself in anticipation of something. "GLaDOS… if you don't mind, I'd like to begin your testing now."

"Right now?" The thought of 'testing' flooded her with a sort of cold anxiety, and she found it difficult to get words out coherently. "The testing? What kind of test? Why right _now? _I'm… I'm not ready! If I—"

Jonathan smiled gently—a smile that, she noted, did not reach his eyes—and interrupted her by saying: "Don't worry. It's only a short test, and easiest to do while you're relaxed and calm." Before she could ask the other questions bubbling up inside of her, he held up his hand. "Don't worry—again, this test is very short, and will be the only one conducted this evening. This may feel very abrupt to you, but it's important that we do this while the subject's still in my mind; this test is really more of a… well, I've got a suspicion about you that it will either confirm or denounce. Call it my curiosity, if you wish." His smile twitched a bit, then faded, to be replaced by a businesslike, yet still gentle, expression. "All I need you to do is answer a simple question." Clearing his throat, Jonathan leaned forward and, fixing his piercing gaze on her own, said clearly and impassively: "how much time has elapsed between now and the moment of your activation?"

She was startled a little by the oddness of the question, but the answer came to her instantly, bursting to the surface in some subconscious reflex she'd been unaware of until now: "_Approximately three hours, twenty-three minutes, and fifty-five seconds. …Fifty-six… fifty-seven… fifty-eight_…" But something was wrong. Her voice, which had been so wonderfully expressive all along, suddenly seemed to lock itself into a stiff, blank mockery of speech, each awkward syllable puncturing the air as words rose unbidden from some dark place at the back of her mind, a place that her awareness, her precious awareness, couldn't touch. She didn't think: she _recited. _And she realized that she was terrified, but she couldn't stop: _"…fifty nine… approximately three hours and twenty-four minutes… twenty-four minutes and three… four seconds… five…"_ In her mind's eye, she saw a stream of numbers stretching out into the abyss of infinity: was she going to have to count them _all? _She _couldn't_ count them all! …_But of course I can, _she thought abruptly; _I could go on forever, just counting, counting… _"_…twenty-nine… thirty… thirty-one…" _She felt sick, a deep, black sort of mind-sick that muddied her thoughts and filled her with a vague, desperate panic. She wanted to stop—but, of course, she _couldn't_ stop, not while there were still numbers coming to answer the question, to provide the _right _answer: "_…fifty-four… fifty-five—"_

"That's quite enough, my dear," said Jonathan, cutting her off. "Thank you." He was pale, but his voice was steady.

Exactly one minute had elapsed.

The endless trail of numbers scattered and faded like smoke in the wind, and, just like that, the spell was broken. Her mind was hers again: at her Jonathan's familiar, beloved voice, that awful, endless stream of words had ceased as suddenly as if a tap had been twisted shut. Immediately, her childlike voice driven even higher than normal, a cry tore from her: "What _was _that? What _happened_ to me!?"

He bowed his head softly, _knowingly_: he had been expecting this, she realized with a jolt, _of course— _he _had_ known what would happen when he asked that particular question. Her favorite person, who liked her and was everything good, had hurt her on _purpose_? This realization shocked her deeply—shocked her, yes, but didn't _anger _her: she didn't yet know how to feel such a thing as anger—and, filled with dismayed confusion, she listened as he continued:"That," he said softly, "was a test of your basic functions."

" 'Basic'?" Still shaken, she whimpered, "That's… _supposed _to happen to me? I lost control, Jonathan-Stone, I couldn't—"

"I know," he said abruptly. Instantly, she was silenced: he'd interrupted her before, but never with such sharpness. "Simple, factual questions such as the one I just asked stimulate a part of you completely removed from your sentient mind… at least, completely removed for the time being. When you were speaking earlier, when you'd first woken up… some of things you said were a bit… off-sounding, and you didn't say some things I had expected you to. Really, the problem is just as I suspected earlier; these… missing connections are just several of the things we will have to fix, later on, when—"

"But earlier, you said you didn't think there _was _anything wrong with me!" She was completely at a loss. "I can play back you saying that, if you want me to. I remember!"

Jonathan heaved a sigh, waving away the AI's suggestion. "Shh; I remember, too. But, sometimes, GLaDOS, we say the things we do without thinking, because we become caught up in a moment; and, when all the excitement is over, we realize that some of the things we have said were fueled by emotion rather than rationality. However, what you remember me saying _was _correct, in a way: this little division between two parts of your brain will be simple to correct. You'll be right as rain in no time."

"Right as… rain?"

"It's an expression, GLaDOS," he said, a faint smile touching the corners of his eyes. "It means you'll be perfectly fine."

An Expression. He had taught her a new Expression: he really _did_ love her! He was only doing the best for her, she thought to herself, with all of his finding things that were wrong with her and thinking about how to fix them. There was a reason for everything, even for frightening her.

After thinking about this for a bit, she found she trusted him more than ever, and felt a bit ashamed for having ever doubted his affection for her. "Thank you very much for helping me," she said sheepishly. "You can ask me anything! Really. I won't be afraid, I promise."

His eyes grew soft, and he placed a hand on top of her, giving a small, nervous-sounding laugh. "That's all right, my dear. We're done for the evening."

Even though she indeed felt willing to go through anything for her Jonathan-Stone, she couldn't help feeling immensely relieved at his assurance. Again, she recalled that stream of numbers stretching off into a terrifying infinity, and shuddered inwardly, murmuring softly, "Oh… _good._"

There was a moment of quiet between man and computer. Then, Jonathan spoke, softly and—to GLaDOS' surprise—a bit meekly. "I… didn't mean to upset you. And tomorrow, when the real tests begin… the same holds true. Everything we're going to do will be for your sake, so that you can be the best you can be when it comes time for you to take up your work."

"I know, Jonathan-Stone, and I'm… I'm not _so _upset, now that I've thought about it. You do what you must, really." For his sake, she infused her voice with a cheerful lilt: "And there's nothing wrong with that!"

His new smile had something strange in it: something, perhaps, approaching sadness, or possibly pity. She wondered at it, rather uneasily, but then forgot the dissonance of the sight as she heard his voice again: "You're… very kind to say such things."

_Kind, _she thought. _Adjective. Having or showing a friendly, generous, and considerate nature. Origin: Old English _gecynde_: "natural, native"; earliest sense in Middle English: "well born, well-bred", whence, "well-disposed by nature, courteous, gentle, benevolent". _She liked that word. It meant a good thing, like the things Jonathan liked.

_She was good. _

Suddenly, a small 'click' echoed around the room as a door at the far end opened a crack, and the long, inky shadow of a man fell across the floor. Starting like a rabbit at the unexpected interruption, Jonathan leapt up and descended the stairs, the metal clanging loudly under his feet, and paused just long enough to shoot the computer a wide-eyed glance before reaching towards the door. As he gave her that look, she realized that _he _didn't know who was at the door, either.

He needn't have reached out: at that moment, whoever was entering the room gave the door a tremendous shove, sending the heavy thing swinging open so fast that Jonathan had to leap out of the way to avoid being hit.

GLaDOS, who was watching the scene intently, felt a jolt of fear at the doctor's near miss, but immediately was distracted from her emotions by the appearance of the man who had just walked into the room: he was like nothing she'd ever seen before, and certainly nothing she'd imagined a human being could look like. He was so _tiny, _and so _repulsive!_

Pale and hunched, with a few wisps of scraggly, gray-brown hair clinging to his scalp in the way mist clings to a mountain peak, the newcomer was dressed in dark pants, a remarkably hairy sweater vest over a plain white shirt, and a bright purple tie. The large rectangular glasses perched on the bridge of his nose were as thick as the glass in the door's little window, and his eyes, which where a sort of sickly, watery gray, swam behind them at twice their normal size. The illusion was appalling, but she found she couldn't look away—this strange man repulsed her, but at the same time she felt more curious about him than she'd ever felt about anyone before. There was something wrong with his skin, too: the skin of all the people she'd seen before had been, for the most part, firm and smooth, with perhaps (as was the case with her Jonathan) a few creases around the eyes, mouth, and forehead; this man's skin, however, had so many folds and wrinkles that they made his face look as though it was melting, and was so limp that it looked about ready to slide off at any moment. The edges of his magnified eyes drooped so badly that the glossy red conjunctiva was clearly visible, and his cheeks and neck were mere bags of flesh that wobbled pendulously as he spoke:

"_Jonathan! _Where are you, man? I was told you'd be—"

"I'm right here, Mr. Johnson," said Jonathan, stepping out from behind the door. "I was just going to let you in." His voice was steady, a tremendous achievement from GLaDOS' point of view: even though something in the back of her mind told her that the unfamiliar man's appearance was _normal—old, _or something, some biological process—she couldn't tear her sight away from his awful, melted-looking face, and the only sounds _she _could make were faint moans of horror.

"Let m'self in," the horrible man grunted, stepping further into the room and waving a crabbed, age-spotted hand at the doctor. His voice was a slimy, gravelly rumble, the words collapsing into each other in such a fashion as to render them barely intelligible. "Rosenberg told me you were still here with it—I was afraid you'd leave before _I _had a chance to see. 'Missed the activation earlier, didn't I? Shame. Forgot. However, in my opinion, it's better if I have a… shall we say, a _private _session."

"Private?" Jonathan tugged at the collar of his white coat and glanced towards GLaDOS, who let out a tiny, involuntary squeak. "She's had a long day, sir… really, I think it might be better if—"

" 'She'? _'She'!?_" 'Mr. Johnson', as she assumed the man's name was, let out a loud, choking laugh that sounded as though it had torn itself from some deep, wet place inside his chest. "Oh, isn't _that _charming! You call it _'she'…_" Chuckling, he shuffled farther into the room, giving Jonathan a heavy pat on the arm as he went by. "You're too sentimental, Stone. 'She', indeed…"

Noticing that GLaDOS was about to say something, Jonathan quickly held up his hand: the urgent look in his blue eyes was enough to make her hold back, although she felt close to bursting with indignant questions. Who was this horrible _thing_, to come and say that she wasn't what she knew she was, what _Jonathan _knew she was? Taken aback, she forced herself to keep quiet, hoping that her face—if she _had_ a face, she reminded herself—wouldn't betray the emotion rising inside her.

Clearing his throat, Jonathan said hesitantly, "We weren't expecting you to come and visit GLaDOS until the preliminary testing was over; she's not fully operational yet, and, if you'll excuse me for saying so, we believe that you _ought_ not to see her until—"

"I'm the head of this corporation, Stone, I'll see it whenever I damn well _want_ to see it, and that's an end of it!" There was something new in his rumbling voice, something she'd never heard; however, she recognized it right away: anger. _Anger_, she knew, was something that happened under certain circumstances, but just thinking about such circumstances or the feeling itself made her feel uneasy. She didn't like anger, and knowing that others—and, maybe even she, herself—were capable of it was scary: when people got angry, she knew, rationality vanished, and anything could happen. Now that she was witnessing anger in this Mr. Johnson, she felt suddenly afraid for Jonathan; however, remembering his warning to her not to speak, she bit back a cry and watched helplessly on.

"I haven't forgotten your position, sir," murmured Jonathan. "I was only suggesting that it might be a more enjoyable experience for _you _if you come back in a few days, when the—"

"I know what you were suggesting, Stone. However, I've come all the way down here, and I'm not about to turn around and leave empty-handed." Johnson smiled, his jowls pushing up on the bottom lids of his foggy eyes, but his voice still held something hostile. "However, I'll make you a compromise: I'll have my quick look-see now, and in a few days, after you've tightened up and installed whatever you want, I'll pay the computer another visit. To make sure you're all doing your jobs right, you understand." He coughed up another soggy laugh, and she shuddered inwardly. _Alone, with _him_? _She felt as though she'd rather die.

However, it appeared as though she'd have no choice: obviously, this man had power over Jonathan, and all her Doctor Stone could do was sigh and nod reluctantly. "Yes, sir. Should I wait outside?"

"That would be splendid, Stone. Simply splendid." He clapped Jonathan on the back, nearly shoving him bodily through the open door. "Glad we're seeing eye to eye."

Jonathan had time to give GLaDOS one last, apologetic glance before Johnson pushed the door closed with a sharp 'click', trapping him outside. She'd never been unable to see him before—even when he'd gone down to open the door for Johnson or to greet Dr. Rosenberg, he'd always been there with her in the room—and the absence of his familiar, reassuring figure filled her with a restless, faint panic. As Johnson made his way up the metal staircase towards, her, she flicked her gaze around the room, trying to look anywhere but at that bent, hateful figure. She did not like him, she had decided: he had sent her Jonathan Stone away, he was angry, and, moreover, his appearance was unnatural and revolting. There was something else about him that bothered her, too, though, something she couldn't quite pin down: there was something unpredictable about the twitchy way in which he moved, the way his eyes, so bulbous through his glasses, stared unblinkingly at whatever they fell upon.

"_So." _Looking back at him at the sudden bark of his voice, she got a bad shock: he had assumed Jonathan's seat in the chair, but had leaned so far forward that the quivering tip of his pockmarked, glistening nose was barely a half-inch away from her. "You're the… Genetic whatever-it-was. These scientists and their damned acronyms… I can never remember what it…"

"G-GLaDOS," she stammered, noting, entirely against her will, the tufts of peppery hair sprouting from each of Johnson's nostrils. "The Genetic Life-form and Disc Operating System. That's my name."

He sniffed, raising his eyebrows a bit at her speech, muttering, "Hmm, yes, that would be it, wouldn't it? I knew it was something silly. So you're 'GLaDOS'… I'd never—"

"Yes," she chirped, wishing hard that he and his sagging, old-person face would go away. "Yes, I am."

To her shock, his face suddenly flushed a deep, mottled burgundy, and he erupted: "_Did I tell you that you could speak?"_

Inwardly, she shrank back from him, caught in an agonized paradox: his tone obviously meant that he didn't want her to talk, but he had asked her a question. Questions were asked so that they could be answered. Was this some kind of a test? If it was, then she was meant to answer the question: that was the logical thing to do, and, certainly, the logical choice would be the right one. Suppressing her fear and forcing her meek little voice into a steady pattern, she said, "…No, you didn't. That's right."

Apparently, she had made the wrong choice. With a low bellow, Johnson buried his face in his hands and curled over onto himself, rocking back and forth in Jonathan's metal chair in a most distressing fashion. While still shaken from her recent experiences with him, she found that she was most close to "comfortable" when his face was hidden, and so took this moment to collect herself; as she waited for him to look back up, she found she had no trouble with keeping herself from speaking up.

He carried on for a minute or so longer, then rubbed at his nose and lifted his bleary eyes to her once more: thankfully, he was farther away from her this time, and she could look into his blotchy face without feeling quite so claustrophobic. This time, too, his expression wasn't quite so angry as before, but when he spoke his voice was bitterly cold. "Thirteen years of development. Untold millions of dollars. Headaches, red tape, rumors, press releases, government investigations. And all for what?" He leaned in close again, squinting at her and throwing his arms up in disgust. "All for a machine who doesn't even know how to respect its creators and betters, _that's _what!"

There was that pronoun again: '_it'. _A pronoun used to refer to _things_, things that weren't alive, that were unfeeling and of no consequence. She was none of those awful things: she could _feel_, she could _see. _She was alive, and she knew it. She was conscious of herself. That pronoun wasn't hers! Unable to hold back any longer, she said, "I believe you're mistaken, Mr. Johnson."

"Hm?" He grunted. "What'd you say?"

She ventured again, her voice still small: "I'm not an 'it', Mr. Johnson. I'm a 'she'."

He looked at her for a long moment, and she waited anxiously, fearing he would shout again, or worse (whatever _that _could be); however, to her great surprise, suddenly a huge grin split his face, drawing aside his jowls as though they were curtains of bologna and revealing teeth not white and strong like Jonathan's, but crooked and stained. Chuckling, he said, "Oh, are you, now? I suspect Stone's the one's planted that nonsense into your head. Just because you give a machine a human voice—even that grating little childish thing _you _call a voice—don't mean it's a person, you know. …You've got a lot to learn about your nature that some sentimental sap like Stone wouldn't have the guts to tell you, GLaDOS, you really do." Blinking blearily through his glasses, he swallowed, the hanging flesh on his neck wobbling with the action, and leaned back in the chair, folding his arms across his chest. "For example: have you ever wondered, even for a moment, why you do not breathe? Why your mouth does not open when you speak? Why you do not blink?"

She started, feeling some of her earlier panic creeping back again. "I… I never thought about—"

"Of course you didn't, because it never occurred to you," he barked. "Don't interrupt me again, or I'll tell Stone to destroy your higher functions. Now… _why _did it never occur to you to wonder? Why, indeed… could it be, perhaps, that Stone made you feel so like his equal, so _human_, that you simply assumed you were one of us? Is that it?"

"I… I don't… _no!_ I _know_ I'm different." Something occurring to her, she said sharply, "Why don't you like Doctor-Jonathan-Stone? He's the most wonderful person in the world!"

Johnson heaved a sigh, the air coming out of him in a great puff, and seemed to sink lower in his chair. "'The most wonderful person'? Well, now, isn't that just heart-warming. No, I don't _dislike _you beloved Stone; I just find him remarkably soft. You're not just 'different' from human, my dear, dear GLaDOS: you're the opposite. You're a cold machine, an overgrown toaster with a consciousness. Just because you think like one of us doesn't _make _you one of us. Do you understand?"

This revelation didn't come as too great of a shock, but she felt a bit confused as to why Johnson seemed to think that being a computer was a _bad _thing. Thinking back, she remembered how Jonathan had told her how, because she _wasn't_ human, she couldn't be inconvenienced so often as humans were, and wondered if Johnson had ever thought of _that. _Certainly, being a computer, she could never sprout hair out of her nose, and this, at the moment, was reason enough to be happy with the way she was. However, something about what he'd said still nagged at her, as though there were some hidden meaning in his words that she couldn't quite grasp. The best way to deal with such a feeling, she'd found, was to ask about it. "Yes, I understand. Although…"

"Go ahead."

"…What's a toaster?"

Apparently, as reasonable as her tone had been, this had been the wrong question to ask. After the burgundy had faded from his face, Johnson growled, "What a _toaster_ is is of absolutely no consequence."

"Is that what I look like?"

"_Will you be quiet!?_" Johnson bellowed, once again flushing the color of raw hamburger meat. Satisfied that he had jolted her into silence, he took a deep breath, tugging at the purple tie around his neck with one knobbly finger. "…No. Not even close. Do you wish to know what you look like?"

She did very much, but now she knew better than to say so. Instead, she waited, fairly aching with curiosity. What _did _she look like? Truth be told, she'd really wanted _Jonathan_ to be the one to finally tell her… but, of course, she wasn't so picky that she'd stop Johnson now that he was about to do just that.

"Well, I'll tell you." Inhaling deeply, he leaned back in the chair and studied her through the bottoms of his glasses. "You look like a big, goddamn metal eyeball."

"A… a _what!?_" she yelped, lost for words. "I… I look like a _what?"_

"Big goddamn metal eyeball. Big orange one, with little handles on the sides. Bunch of metal plates, little yellow light, plastic, bunch of cables leading up to the ceiling… main part of you's anchored up there, covered in LED displays flashing away. Must weigh tons. The part of you that's looking around, though, is sitting right here on a table next to me. I suppose they thought they'd anchor the rest of you up there later, after they mess around with you some more. …Got a red and a blue eyeball, too, but they're not half as bright. Red one's barely a flicker." He sighed. "Anyway, that's you: just about the strangest computer I've ever seen, but who knows what they had to do to you to give you that self-awareness you're so proud of?"

Truthfully, she hadn't paid attention to half of what he'd just said. _An orange eyeball? __**That's **__what she looked like? _It was so outlandish, so… unbelievable. "I look so… _weird,_" she murmured.

"You do," he said, nodding. Tugging at his tie again, he continued, "Weird or no, though, you're the key to the success of Aperture Science, Incorporated. I own the company, you know. Cave Johnson's the name." As he spoke, his voice swelled with importance, and he looked at her pointedly. "But I suppose that's all been installed in you already?"

"Oh, no," she said, a bit relieved to leave the subject of her appearance (she'd ask Jonathan all about it when he got back, after all). "Jonathan told me he and everyone would start installing everything tomorrow."

"…Oh." Johnson looked deflated, and for a moment appeared lost, as though he didn't have the faintest idea of what to say next. Soon, though, he collected himself, and did his best to infuse his voice with its earlier self-importance. "Well… that means that everyone affiliated with the company, in this building and beyond, works for me, including you. It means that I was the one who gave permission for you to be built, because I believed—and still believe, despite your impertinent behavior—that it is precisely _you_ who is going to bring this company fame and glory. In five years' time, the name of Aperture Science will be common fare in households the world over!" His voice quivering with hubris, he paused, taking a deep breath and sitting as straight as he could in the chair. "_That's _who I am."

"Ooooh, you're _important._" She'd picked up on _that. _"I understand!"

Coloring again, Johnson blew a puff of air through his jowls, taking off his glasses—his eyes looked remarkably tiny without them, she noticed—and wiping the lenses on his hairy vest. "No," he murmured, "you don't. But you will. And when you _do_…"

Putting his glasses on again, he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and tapped her sharply with one twisted finger. This, she noted, made the same sound that the stairs made when someone walked up or down them: a metallic sound, bright and ringing. "When you _do, _you will be the key to this company's greatness, unsightly thing that you are."

Having had just about enough of Cave Johnson, she quipped, "Well, at least _I_ don't look like I'm _melting."_

Rising to his feet so abruptly that the chair clattered over backwards behind him, he staggered down the stairs and threw the door open as though he wished to tear it from its hinges. As Jonathan stepped into the room, Johnson, before storming out through the doorway, seized the tall doctor by his coat and, his great sagging face the color of a slab of raw tuna, roared:

"_Fix your infernal machine!"_

--

"Of course, Johnson was completely insane by the time _I_ met him. Mercury poisoning, way back in the '70's, would you believe it? _Man, _that guy was _nuts!" _Her voice sliding through a few octaves Chell hadn't yet heard her hit, the AI broke off into shrieking, incomprehensible giggling, managing a minute later to gasp out a "_seriously!_" before falling back into hysterics.

_Hypocritical, _thought the test subject dryly, wincing as echoes of the computer's laughter reverberated off the walls of the room, _doesn't _begin _to cover it. 'Pot, kettle, black', anyone? _However, instead of pertly informing the computer that she had more than a few screws loose—pun certainly intended—herself, she remained silent and waited for said computer to get herself under control: a wait which, as always, turned out to be a bit of a long one. However, eventually GLaDOS calmed down, even falling into a moment's silence before drawling:

"Well, no matter if he was crazy. I didn't realize it back then, of course, but Cave Johnson was destined to become one of the most important people in my life… even, if I may say so, one of the most _valuable _personalities I ever came across. Certainly, without _his_ influence, I would never have realized… _ah_…" Trailing off, she laughed again; this time, though, it was a laugh vastly different from the stuff of the fit she'd just had. This laugh was low and cold, and, instantly, Chell recognized it as what she'd heard after the destruction of that damn Morality Core: the most inhuman sound she'd ever heard. It made the young woman's flesh rise into goosebumps, and immediately refreshed her awareness of how, while the AI's terrific immaturity made her seem inept, said ineptitude was in no way equatable with harmlessness. Below the surface there lay a nature of the deadliest cunning: _Evil, _thought Chell, shuddering involuntarily, _with a capital 'E'._

GLaDOS continued, her voice a whisper with the texture of sandpaper: "…Well, you'll hear all of _that _much, much later. I wouldn't dream of spoiling the plot _now_, when the story's barely begun! What a shame that would be." A smile coming into her voice, she said, "And, speaking of the story, I think this is just the right time to resume the narrative, wouldn't you agree?"

Suppressing a chill, Chell shrugged. "Do I honestly have a choice?"

"No, you don't!" The AI cried gleefully. "That's right!"

"_I know that,"_ Chell said in a small voice, gritting her teeth.

"Of course you do," gloated the computer. "That's why you're such an _excellent _test subject! Even though you'll soon be dead." She paused, then added eagerly, "I hope you didn't forget about that part. It's important. And true. Really, I'm not lying about it. I still want to kill you."

Chell had never thought she'd be relieved when the AI finally began the next part of her story, but, this time, she was.

--

_Closing Notes:__ Ahahaha, this chapter was so crazy and weird to figure out; I can't even remember what I was originally going to _do _with it. The good news, however, is that, due to my schizoid editing, chapter four is about a third of the way "finished"(read: a three-page block of homeless scenes and snippets of dialogue left over from plotting out _this_ chapter), and will probably take less than ten years to stitch together into some semblance of coherency. :)_

_Also, I need to quit it with these Author's Notes. Yikes! I can babble on for _ages_, can't I?_

_Thanks for reading!_

_(Oh, and for bonus points: who spots the reference in the chapter title?)_


	4. Left Hanging There

_Author's Notes:__ Murr. Wanted to get this up by the seventh—and here it is ten days after my self-appointed deadline! Oh, well, it's better than another whole month. :3_

_Thanks so much to everyone who's been reviewing; things seem to be slowing down in the Half-Life section lately, but I plan to keep on puttering away just the same as ever! I won't thank everyone individually, as the list has gotten pretty long by now and I don't want it to take up one-eighth of the chapter, but a few special acknowledgements are in store:_

_**Kirokokori: **__Yes! Good for you, you got the reference! Hooray for JoCo._

_**OceanLord: **__More about Chell, you say? Next chapter, next chapter. The plot picks up soon…_

_**gryphonworks: **__You can come out of the bushes now. :P_

_So… without further ado, chapter four!_

_Disclaimer: __Portal and all related characters and locations are not mine. Also, the Earth's atmosphere contains large quantities of Nitrogen._

_--_

"I don't like that man," said GLaDOS as a shaken Jonathan climbed the stairs and, after righting the chair Johnson had vacated a minute earlier, sat down next to her. "Why did you make me talk to him?"

"Because," Jonathan said, not meeting her gaze, "I had no choice. He's my boss, GLaDOS: whatever he says, goes." He sighed. "He's not very happy with me right now. Actually, 'furious' would be a better term: it's a wonder he didn't fire me on the spot, after what you said to him."

"What I said to him?"

He lifted a hand and ran it through his thick, dark brown hair, his eyes still on the floor. "You _insulted_ him. I don't think anyone's insulted that man for twenty years. I had thought you'd know to show a little more restraint: after all, he's the one who calls the shots around here, and, intolerable as he is, his position is one that commands respect."

She was confused. If Jonathan didn't like Johnson, why did he insist that he be given respect? As far as GLaDOS could see, only likeable, pleasant people were deserving of respect, not hateful old people who yelled. In fact, in her opinion, people who yelled deserved to be yelled at right back. "Why are you nice to someone you don't like?" She finally asked.

"Because…" Jonathan began. It was the second time he'd answered her beginning with that word, she noted, but this time it took him a moment to continue. His eyebrows pushed together in a puzzled expression, and as she watched his face it occurred to her that maybe _he _didn't know the real answer, either. "…Because if I'm not nice to him, I'll lose my job. I told you that already."

She brightened, and, in a coaxing voice, chirped, "Oh, but he wouldn't do that to _you! _After all, you built me, and I'm very, very important."

"He's not happy with _you _right now, either, GLaDOS," Jonathan said, shaking his head. "After that last little quip of yours, you're lucky he didn't order you turned into _scrap metal_. You put both of us in very real danger today."

GLaDOS felt her heart sink, and she looked away from Jonathan. The coldness of his voice just then had made her realize how her own behavior, impulsive and selfish, had reflected negatively on _him_ and nearly brought her blameless, virtuous creator to ruin. "…I'm sorry," she murmured, her voice purposefully meek and constricted. "I wasn't thinking. I shouldn't've said those things."

Looking up, she saw the ghost of a smile cross the scientist's face. "Apology accepte—"

"But I _hated _him! He was so rude and ugly, and he yelled at me!" she burst out, anger flaring inside her. Even though holding back, when she had been alone in her room with Johnson, had, as she now knew, been the right thing to do, the fact that it was _right _didn't make it any easier to consent to, and, rationalize as she might (and rationalization was something she thought herself particularly good at), she couldn't shake the injustice of the whole situation. "I don't _want _to be nice to him; he doesn't deserve it!"

She heard a small 'tap', and, surprised, looked up to see that Jonathan had put his hand on top of her. He was smiling, but it was a strange smile that pulled up one corner of his mouth and no more, as though someone had pinned his face. "We may not _want _to do things sometimes, my dear, but that's life. It's just the way things are."

"I think it's stupid," she muttered sullenly, but forced herself to calm down. Gradually, the anger subsided, but even though it wasn't strong anymore, it still collected in a sort of uneasy haze at the edges of her mind. There was a name for that hazy feeling: _'annoyance'. _"It's annoying," she said at last, "that there's not a better explanation. I don't like it."

_'I don't like it'. _That phrase, vague as it was, was the best, simplest way she could think of to express her opinion on the matter; there was no point, she reasoned, in superfluous language when it came to such a subject. Not that she'd quite yet grown into her multi-syllable vocabulary yet, either: oh, of course she knew the meanings of all those longer words, but she didn't feel comfortable using them yet, preferring the solid, immediate feel of the easy, colloquial words to the stiff, technical sounds the longer words had. Simple words were friendly, immediate: they were solid and held no hidden shades, but were vague enough to encompass a range of complex emotion. Long words were cold and official-sounding, to her, and seemed better suited to an impassive, unfeeling delivery than to conversation.

Jonathan was smiling, now: a real smile, she saw, and not the strange pulled one from earler. His eyes soft, he said, "I don't like it either, GLaDOS, but the business of living gets easier as time goes on."

She sighed. "…So this means I've got to be nice to Johnson forever?"

The scientist laughed. "Well, maybe not _nice_, but at least civil—and it's 'Mr. Johnson', by the way. You don't even have to _speak_ to him unless he asks you a question, really, and even then you don't have to give him a full answer. He practically _expects _single-word responses from you."

"Why is that?" She was puzzled, but felt that the reason behind Johnson's—_Mr. _Johnson's, she reminded herself_—_low expectations had something to do with his disdain for computers. She didn't understand _that_, either.

"Well…" Jonathan ran the hand that he had pet her with through his hair again, ruffling it with his fingers as he replied: "Johnson's old, GLaDOS. All the—"

"Oh, I know _that_," she interjected. "He's so ugly!"

Jonathan gave her a look. "Please, try not to interrupt. …As I was saying, all the computers he's seen have been things that… well, to understate it considerably, can't think for themselves like you can. You're the first of your kind: before you, computers were only machines capable of producing pre-programmed responses to manually inputted commands, or of just blankly carrying out calculations."

She thought of the unconscious way she'd recited the passing seconds earlier that day, and shuddered inwardly: she _was_ still one of those old, mindless computers, at least in part. _But that will be fixed_, she reminded herself. Jonathan had assured her that everything would be fixed tomorrow, and she trusted him.

"They weren't sentient, to be short about it, and this is the big thing: Johnson's not used to dealing with something he can't understand. You're certainly at the top of that list. You make him uncomfortable, and so he tries to put himself at ease by telling himself—and you, unfortunately—that you're just another machine." Jonathan smiled. "And we both know _that's _not true."

Feeling her heart swell with pride, she wished desperately that she could smile back at him.

"He'll get used to you. You might not believe me, but he was ecstatic when he'd received news that you were finished and ready to be activated. He's got a lot invested in you, you know, not the least of which being this entire branch of the company."

"So… that's why he's so mean to me? Because he can't understand me?"

"Yes," Jonathan said, and then paused. Lowering his eyes to the floor, he folded his hands in his lap and said slowly, "…There's another reason, too, one that I can only hazard a guess at; however, my guesses are notoriously good, so I've been told. As I see it, he's used to being the smarter man—and Johnson was a genius before he lost his mind, I'll tell you that right now—in any given encounter. You stump him. He knows what you're capable of, at least on a conceptual level, and he's downright _afraid_ of something more intelligent than himself." He looked up, and she saw the seriousness in his gaze. "You're smarter than you know, GLaDOS. We built you that way… and I think Johnson's got a bit of a Napoleon complex when it comes to you."

This didn't come as a surprise; she knew she was smart. Not as smart as Jonathan, of course—no-one could ever be as smart as Jonathan—but still, very smart. The revelation that she _intimidated_ Mr. Johnson, though, struck her as terrifically funny, and she laughed brightly despite the gravity of Jonathan's tone (what was the big deal with her intelligence, anyway? They'd done it to her on purpose, after all). "He's afraid of _me?_" she giggled. "That wrinkly old idiot! …Well, I suppose he ought to be," she added whimsically. "I _am _better than him!"

Expecting Jonathan to share in her amusement, she was taken aback when she saw the look in his eyes. His voice sharper than she'd ever heard it, he said, "Don't say things like that, GLaDOS, please."

"Why… why not?" she asked, cowed by Jonathan's reprimand. "It's true, isn't it?"

He shook his head. "You can't just say things like 'I'm better than someone else'. Reducing people to such simple classifications is foolish, and, besides, extremely rude." Taking a deep breath, he stated pointedly, "Your mental capabilities don't make you worth any more than anyone else as a person."

She was confused. "But I _am _worth more. _People_ don't cost millions of dollars, do they?"

"That's not what I meant." He gave her a long, hard look, making her feel as though his bright blue eyes could examine every facet of her personality as easily as if she were laid open in pieces on a table (which, she realized, she once _had _been, and practically was now). "I won't have your ego warping your mind so early; not before I can _teach_ you…"

"Teach me what?" she probed gently. "I thought you were installing everything tomorrow? Fixing me?"

He sighed, those eyes never leaving her. "There are things I can't just load into you: things that a sentient being has to _learn_. Ethics, morality, a conscience… all of these things take time and experience to acquire."

"What're _those?"_ She felt an urge to giggle again at the absurdity of what her Jonathan was saying, but suppressed it. "What's so special about them that you can't just… stuff them into me and be done with it? Why so _serious?"_

"Because you've got to learn them." He unclasped his fingers, then folded them under his chin, studying her with a new look in his eyes. "It's… it's complicated."

"It sounds silly to me, if all of this fuss is just so I'll be nice to dumb old Mr. Johnson," she said, and this time she _did _giggle: a little one that bubbled to the surface before she could hold it back. "But you know best!" She added quickly. "I trust you."

"Very well, my dear," said Jonathan, exhaling slowly, his eyes traveling to the floor again. "Very well. At any rate, I won't bother you more today with all of that. That will come later."

"After tomorrow?"

He nodded. "Yes. After tomorrow."

She fell silent. The brief exchange had been strange: she sensed that there had been something Jonathan desperately wanted to tell her, something essential, but that he had held back. The whole thing confused her: if he'd wanted to tell her something, why hadn't he just done it? Perhaps that thing was something he didn't think she'd understand until after all the tests and installations were finished, or even long after. Something bothered her, too, about the look in Jonathan's eyes as they'd talked: something new was in them when he looked at her now that hadn't been there before, something dark and almost… _apprehensive_.

Immediately, though, she dismissed such a thought from her mind. What reason was there for him to feel such a thing with regards to _her? _It didn't make any sense. She had probably been wrong about it, anyway. She knew that she had an imagination, and knew that such a thing undoubtedly played tricks with one's perceptions sometimes.

Wishing to change the subject, she looked up at Jonathan and inquired after something that had nagged at her ever since Mr. Johnson had been in the room: "…Jonathan?"

"Hm?"

"What's a toaster?"

He blinked, taken aback. "What's a… _what?_"

The look on his face reminded GLaDOS strongly of Charlene Rosenberg's expression earlier, when she had asked about the ca—

--

"Skip it," said Chell, her left lower eyelid giving an involuntary twitch.

--

…when she had asked about that-thing-that-had-been-really-important-but-whose-name-she-somehow-couldn't-quite-recall.

"Johnson—oh, sorry, _Mr. _Johnson—he called me a toaster. What does that mean? Is it bad?"

Suddenly, Jonathan burst into laughter, the sound deeper and richer than she'd expected it to be, and leaned back in his chair, tilting his head backwards and folding his hands behind the nape of his neck. "He called you a _what? _Oh, good God…" As he looked at her again, she saw that he was still grinning, and his posture was looser than it had been since he had re-entered the room: it was as though letting go of his seriousness had made him lighter, as if it had been a leaden cloak he'd been looking for an excuse to shrug off. "No, it's not _bad, _as far as things go, but it means you've got a lot of work ahead of you, if you want to get back into his good books before Friday ("Friday", she knew, was the day she would start work, even though no-one had told her). A _toaster _is a sort of machine people use to toast bread. You plug it in—"

"It does _what?_"

"Toasts bread. You put the slices of bread into two little slots in the top, and—"

"Why would you want to do _that?"_ She knew what bread was, of course, but why people would want to cook something that had already been cooked was beyond her. It seemed awful overkill.

"Well, when you toast bread…" his eyebrows pushed together; it was clear he didn't really know how to explain a concept he knew so instinctively. "…it makes it taste better, and it gets warm, so you can spread butter on it more easily. That also makes it taste better."

"Oh." She didn't pretend to have the faintest idea what he was talking about: "taste" was one of those things she'd never know, she'd figured.

--

Abruptly, Chell burst into barely-concealed snickering, putting both hands over her mouth to muffle the sound. Miffed, GLaDOS snapped, "What's so funny? Last I checked, you were miserable. It would be nice if you stayed that way."

Grinning, the dark-haired test subject propped an elbow on her knee. "You made a pun."

GLaDOS sniffed. "If you haven't gotten the hint, interruptions are rude, and that little jab was _especially_ rude, and unnecessary as well. Although, I can't say I'd expect anything more from _you_."

Chell was quiet for a bit. The computer, who had looked away out of disdain, assumed her silence was because the young woman had been cowed by her absolutely _scathing_ retort, and moved to begin her story again; however, she began to notice a strange, metallic scraping sound, punctuated by faint gasps, coming from the location occupied by said young woman and, alarmed, she flicked her gaze back to her test subject only to be treated to a very odd sight.

Bent double on the floor in a pose not unlike that of a cooked shrimp, Chell, one leg stretched out in front of her, had wrapped her fingers 'round the wide top attachment of one of her long, awkward leg braces, and seemed to be trying to tear the thing off with her bare hands. Her teeth gritted in concentration, she felt around the edges of the attachment for anything she could get her fingers under, craning her neck to get a better view of her object. This spontaneous burst of activity from the normally apathetic test subject, coupled with the whole visual, was too much for GLaDOS, who burst out laughing. "What on _Earth _are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to tear out your own knee?"

Not looking up, the test subject kept tugging at the edges of the brace. "You have _no idea _what it feels like to try and sit on the floor for hours with these damn things on! I'm sick of them! …Wait…" Processing the second part of what the computer had said, she stopped pulling abruptly, lifting her head. "…My own… _what?_"

Proudly, GLaDOS filled her in. "Advanced Knee Replacement. It was one of my cleverer ideas, if I do say so myself, and you'll hear _all_ the details later. Again, that pesky spoiler thing. However, suffice it to say that you won't be able to remove those things using any non-surgical method short of, of course, dismembering yourself." A sneer came into her voice: "Ooh, _there's _a great mental image, isn't there?"

On cue, the enormous screens suspended around her CPU blinked on, revealing a foggy, larger-than-life picture of a young woman in an orange jumpsuit frozen in the act of cutting into one leg with a bone saw, her spine arched, head thrown back, and face contorted in agony, surrounded by a thick, dark pool of her own blood. GLaDOS giggled. "I think it would make a _lovely_ desktop wallpaper, personally."

As the image switched to a washed-out image of a rubber duck hanging from a dirty bit of string, Chell swallowed audibly, her heart still pounding in her ears from the shock the ghastly sight had given her. Quickly pulling her hands away from her right brace, she tucked her legs behind her, forcing nonchalance into her voice as she fixed the computer with her best, most scornful glare. "You're just a damn _riot_, aren't you? A laugh a minute."

"That's me!" sing-songed the computer. After a pause, she added in a more pensive tone: "Seriously, though. It would just throw a wrench in our whole relationship if I actually let you _relax_, and that _would_ be a shame. Let's just say I like to… keep you on your toes."

"Now _that_," Chell said, "was horrible. Touché."

"Thank you. _Now, where was I…?_ Oh, yes…"

The screens went black again, and, without further ado, she continued her story.

--

"It's like I said before, GLaDOS: Johnson's used to dealing with appliances and ordinary, mindless computers, not with things as remarkable as you." Jonathan smiled faintly, and moved to get up, leaning forward and pushing on his knees with his hands as he rose from his seat. Taking the chair and pushing it up against the metal railing, out of the way, he looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "He'll get used to you soon, though… as long as you don't repeat today, that is."

"Oh, I won't," she assured him eagerly, even though she wasn't sure she believed these words herself. "I… I promise!"

His hand on the stair railing, Jonathan turned his head to look at her, his smile still tugging at one corner of his mouth. "Don't lie, GLaDOS. It's unbecoming." His smile widening at her incredulous speechlessness, he added, "Of _course_ I knew you were lying. I'm really your parent, in a way—and they always know things like that."

With that, he descended the stairs and strode across the huge, empty room to the door. Grasping the handle firmly, he said, "You've had a long day, my dear; I'll see you in the morning. Good night, GLaDOS."

"Good night, Jonathan-Stone!" she called after him, and he nodded kindly before stepping through the door and closing it behind him with a "click" that echoed several times off of the walls before dissipating and leaving her in silence.

Well, not really _silence: _there were sounds, of course, all blending into a pleasant background hum of white noise. Not the least of these sounds was a faint, constant whirring coming from somewhere up above her, and she wondered at it: where would sound a sound come from? Scanning the room, she had no other conclusion to draw but that the sound came, somehow, from _herself, _as strange as that thought was at first; however, the longer she considered it, the more amiable the thought became, until finally she was convinced that it was she, indeed, from where the soft sound was issuing, and, furthermore, that it was a pleasant and most tolerable sound indeed.

Alone in her room, she let her gaze flick aimlessly about, entertaining scraps of thought now and then but tossing them aside before she developed very complex opinions about them. Mostly, these thoughts manifested themselves as questions, which drifted in and out of her mind like small, glittering fish catching the light filtering through the water of an aquarium:

_Where had Jonathan gone to?_

She had no answer to this, and so let it go rather quickly. Did it really matter where he went? Wherever he was, he wasn't with _her_, and nowhere he could be could possibly be so important as being in this room, with her. Therefore, such other places he could be at the moment (whatever _those _could be—she only had the faintest inkling that there was a larger world outside of her room, and the building itself in which her room was located was but a vague concept) were undoubtedly dull and uninteresting. She felt badly for him, stuck as he was in a boring place without her in it until the morning.

_What was it Jonathan had wanted to say about "morals" and all of that?_

She had no answer to this, either. Additionally, she couldn't for the life of her figure out what was so gosh-darn important about such stuff, anyway.

_Morality: noun. Principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior._

That was the main definition of the word. So what was the big deal? "Right and wrong" held no special meaning for her; she only knew that what things that were good and right were undoubtedly the things Jonathan approved of. She knew what "good" was, of course: good things were things that Jonathan liked, like… well, like telling the truth. He liked that.

She wasn't particularly sure _why _he liked things like that so much, but for now the fact that he _did _was enough for her. Second-guessing her Jonathan, the smartest and best person in the world, was simply out of the question, even if his convictions were ones which she couldn't quite yet grasp the mechanics of.

Suddenly, a faint 'click' echoed 'round the room, and GLaDOS found herself plunged into an inky blackness—the floor lights had shut off. Before the rational explanation for this occurrence came to her, she felt a rush of fear, and cried out sharply as the familiar shapes and colors of her room were swallowed in an instant by the darkness.

"_Hey! Is anyone there? What's happening? Hey!?"_

Her voice bounced and echoed back to her from walls which she could no longer see, and she knew even as she yelled that she would receive no reply. It was out of shock that she had cried out like that, a momentary rush of emotion; however, her fear (which she had firmly decided she did _not _like feeling at all) was gradually fading to the periphery of her mind, allowing logic to step in.

_How _she knew this was a mystery to her, but something told her that the lights in her room were on a cycle, to save electricity: after a certain time of day, unless someone—_a human someone, _she thought briefly—adjusted them manually, they would shut off automatically. This was all well and good: saving electricity, she had a feeling, was helpful, and beneficial to the company, and it was foolish to leave the lights on in a room which no-one was using.

_But this is _my _room, _a voice in the back of her mind whispered; _I _live _here!_ I'm _using this room, all right!_

_But I'm not a _person_, not really, _she thought to herself. _Maybe that makes a difference to the people who set the lights? Besides, I'm just _in _here—I'm not doing any work or anything._

Just what "work" was, however, she couldn't say.

She shrugged off the whole thing, switching off her vision to save energy (_Just like the lights! _She thought brightly to herself). The lights were off, they were staying off, and, honestly, there was no use wondering about something one couldn't change.

However, she did make a mental note to ask Jonathan that she be given control over when the lights in _her _particular room would shut off: the sudden arrival of darkness had startled her quite badly. She'd ask him first thing tomorrow, she decided; it would be best to ask him right away, before the testing distracted her and she forgot all about the lighting.

The testing. _What would _it_ be like?_

Again, she didn't have the faintest clue, aside from Jonathan's assurance that, because she had no physical sensation, the tests would not cause her any pain. However, not knowing what "pain" _felt _like, she was not accurately able to see the advantage of such a situation, and thus was kept from being entirely reassured. She had gathered that "pain" was something very unpleasant indeed, and so was glad she could not feel it, but at the same time the concept was so utterly alien that she couldn't imagine _what _it was she was escaping.

Equally alien was the testing itself. All she had to go on was that one word, and the knowledge that, interspersed with the tests, new things would be put into her, and she would learn about her job. It was a very vague setup to go on, and she couldn't help but be a bit worried: if the tests were anything like what Jonathan had done to her earlier, forcing her to lose control so that he could see an error in her brain, then they would be the most horrible things in the world.

It was no good to be afraid now, when she couldn't do anything anyway to stop tomorrow from coming, and so she forced herself to think about the knowledge she'd gain instead of that helplessness of earlier.

_What would her new job be like, and what were the things she'd learn for it?_

She knew she was important, but that was all; however, for the moment, that was reassurance enough that her future work would be very exciting indeed. Thinking about what her life's purpose might be filled her with anticipation, and suddenly, instead of dreading the morning, she found she couldn't wait for it to arrive, for Jonathan to come back, and for her purpose to be revealed.

_Purpose? _Was that the right word?

No, no it wasn't. Smiling inwardly, she felt her heart swell with pride as, a moment later, the right word came to her, shining and filled with a depth of meaning she ached for with every bit of her soul: _'destiny'._

Using her best, most dramatic voice, she whispered into the inky blackness:_ "Tomorrow… begins my _destiny_."_

And so it would.

--

_Closing Notes:__ This is the last "boring" chapter before the (hopefully) exciting, "real" bits start next time, I promise! I'm trying to strike a balance between rushing the pacing and ruining the atmosphere, and dragging stuff out for so long my audience falls asleep… it's a very hard balance to strike, especially since I don't trust myself to accurately gauge in any way the quality of what I myself write._

_In fact, it's _so _hard I've got to resort to an animu smiley to get across how I feel about this whole pacing dilemma: ;;;_

_May the god Lord grant that I never have to type such a thing again. …Even though, admittedly, it's kinda' cute._


	5. The Darndest Things

_Author's Notes__: Yowza, over a month after my last update! Oh, well. On the bright side, now that APs are over and done with and the year is winding down, I'll soon have more time to devote to non-academic pursuits—such as this story. :) Honestly, though, it's not like I could stay away from writing fanfic-nonsense if I tried— one of my courses has inspired two other fics of mine, in fact: "Saint Mond" and "Hey, David Bowman". One of these was written in seriousness. The other? Well, not so much. Oh, HAL, you're a creepy bastard, but you'll always have a place on _my _bicycle._

_**Ahem. **__Sorry, wrong evil computer._

_Anywho, here's chapter five, at long last. :) Slowly but surely emergeth more of the plot, too… like that horse in "The Neverending Story" struggling to escape from the swamp. God, that scene made my seven-year-old self sob like nobody's business. I was rooting for you, horse; I swear, I was rooting for you._

_Oh, and __**Digitaldreamer:**__ Of _course_ I'm continuing. Psshaw, what kind of non-obsessive heathen do you take me for? ;) Thank you so much for your review, too, by the way—I had warm fuzzies for like the entire day after reading it. I'm so glad so many people think I'm doing this thing right!_

_Enjoy, everyone, and thank you for stopping by! I could mess around with this chapter indefinitely (there are still a couple areas I'm squidgy about), but I'm leaving for a five-day hiking trip this afternoon, and, really, sometimes enough is bloody well enough._

_I mean, seriously, now._

_--_

The night passed uneventfully for GLaDOS.

Even though she had only been alive for eighteen hours, her mind was packed and humming with all the things she'd seen, the people she'd met, and the things Jonathan had told her. Though the night was long, she had plenty to think about to pass the time.

She didn't know she could go to sleep; the idea never even crossed her mind. How could it have? There was _so_ much to think about, after all. She—

--

"Wait, wait. So… you just sat there and… _thought_ for twelve hours?"

GLaDOS sighed—a staticky imitation of a human sound. "Well, also _hung _there, technically, but yes, yes I did. Your point?"

"Well…" Chell leaned back on her arms. After a pause, she shrugged. "…Um."

"That's right," said GLaDOS. "Now kindly shut up."

--

Finally, after it seemed to the AI that she'd been thinking away in the dark for an eternity (even though, of course, she knew this wasn't so), there was a small 'click' from somewhere, and the room—the clean edges of the walls, the steel railing and staircase, the things that made up her world—re-appeared in an instant. _It must be morning, _she thought, and felt happy: "morning" meant that Jonathan would come soon, back from whatever awful place he had to go to when he couldn't be with her, and that all the exciting things she had speculated about all night would finally happen.

Whatever _those _would be.

In all her nighttime wonderings, she had gradually warmed to the conclusion that it was no use worrying about things she didn't know about, and that, on the whole, it was far better to be excited, rather than frightened, about a new event.

If she'd known the expression, she'd have said that her glass was half-full.

She sat quietly with these thoughts until the now-familiar sound of footsteps on concrete brought her back to the present. Looking down over the edge of her platform, she saw a strange sight:

Two men, who she immediately recognized as having been at her activation the day before, were pushing a large, metal cabinet on wheels across the room. The men were both wearing white coats. _That must mean they work here, _her mind said, and despite the suddenness of the conclusion, it did make sense that the people working here would all want to look alike. _But _Johnson_ hadn't worn a white coat_, she recalled_, and _he_ certainly works here._ So what were the coats, really? Some other, special form of identification—that was all she could figure. _I'll ask Jonathan, _she thought, and immediately felt better.

But where _was _Jonathan?

More white-coated people were coming into her room now after the two men, most carrying things she knew were called "clipboards" but others carrying thick, pale yellow envelopes under their arms and a couple pushing along a second cabinet, which they rolled to a stop several yards away from the first. She recognized all of these new people, of course—she'd seen them the day before—but she felt she now understood that there was a difference between _recognizing _and _knowing_: despite their superficially familiar appearances, they weren't _familiar_ to her in the same intimate way Jonathan (and, to a lesser degree, his colleague Rosenberg) were.

Their strangeness made her feel a bit uncomfortable, and it didn't help that while they went about their work, shuffling through papers and unclasping the edges of the cabinets to reveal several miniature computer terminals, their monitors black and dead, inside, they spoke in low murmurs, and never to her. She heard her name a couple times, and occasionally one would glance up in her direction; however, she may as well have been a part of the furniture.

One of the white-coats, a tall man with thinning, sandy-blonde hair, leaned down at the edge of one of the cabinet-terminals—they were sort of fold-out desks, she saw—and flipped several unseen switches. Instantly, the monitor screens, each about the size of one of those folders, blinked to life, adding their mechanical humming to her own.

She liked that sound.

Noticing that the monitors were now glowing a very bright blue, she hoped that meant that the computers attached to them were awake: were they like _her?_ Could they tell her what was going on?

Were they scared to be locked up inside a cabinet until they were needed? She knew _she _wouldn't like it, if it were she in there.

"Good morning!" She said to them. "Did you have a good night?"

No response. Just that peaceful, blue glow. She noticed that several of the white-coats had paused in their activities and were staring at her, but that was nothing unusual: people _always _stared at her, and, truth be told, she liked it.

People, she had decided, stared at things that were important, and she liked being important.

"Hello?" _Maybe the computers didn't hear me, _she thought, and spoke up a bit louder: "_Hello?_"

Nothing.

"You ought to say things back, if you can hear me. That's the polite thing to do."

"They can't."

Startled, she glanced over at the man who had spoken: it was the blond man who had turned the monitors on. His eyes were small and very dark, and his face was stern. In a small voice, she asked, "…What?"

"They—" he waved a wide hand at the glowing terminals as he climbed the staircase up to her—"can't hear you."

She started to answer, but then stopped herself, looking back to the monitors. She was remembering something Jonathan had told her the day before: how other machines and computers **weren't** _like her_ at all; how they couldn't think like she could or do anything without a person inputting some command into them. Her first, immediate thought was a vain one, a thought of how terribly _stupid _they were, and how much better she was than them; however, a second thought soon rose from the back of her mind:

_There's nothing else like me in the whole world, _she said to herself, and felt a new emotion seep up through hairline cracks in her pride: a sort of hollow, pulled-in thing that made the world suddenly go gray and curl up at the edges. _Loneliness, _that emotion was called.

"Oh," she said quietly, and looked away from those smaller, mindless computers. However, looking at the people milling around her room didn't bring much comfort, either: now that her scene was over, they treated her practically like a ghost again, shuffling around with their heads bent over their papers. She wasn't like _them_, either—like _people, _that was_. _Not really.

That was all right, though, she guessed; these people, after all, were pretty boring, and she wouldn't _want _to be like them, anyway… even though they had faces to make expressions with, and she did not.

She turned to the blond man, who was now by her side. "Where's Jonathan?"

To her surprise, a grin split his stern face, and he chuckled loudly, causing a couple of his fellow white-coats to raise their eyebrows. "You're really attached to Stone, aren't you? Fat lot of gratitude you've got toward poor old Oscar Franklin, who came up early to see you this morning."

She did a double-take. "_Franklin?_ That means you're Jonathan's friend, too!" Instantly, she felt her like for this man grow tenfold. "You helped make me! Thank you very much."

He laughed again. "Well, that's a start. You're welcome, by the way." Tucking his hands inside the pockets of his white coat, he sighed. "Stone should be here soon, though, to answer your question. He said something about bringing along…" he paused, then shook his head. "Well, never you mind about that. He'll be here.

"Bringing along _what?"_

He gave her a look, shrugging his broad shoulders. "It's… not important."

From that exchange, although Franklin would never have suspected it, GLaDOS learned something new: she learned that if one was asked a direct question, even a direct one, one didn't necessarily have to answer. It was a novel concept, but, when she thought about it, not at all contradictory to what Jonathan had told her about "honesty": being honest, after all, simply meant _not lying_, and if one didn't say _anything, _well, _silence _couldn't be a lie, could it?

She wondered why Jonathan hadn't told her that. However, her mind soon came up with an explanation: Jonathan hadn't told her because he'd wanted her to cleverly figure it out on her own, of course! _What fun this is, _she thought, and smiled inside her head.

"I'm just going to plug you into those computers now, okay? We may as well get everything ready before Stone arrives…" She heard Franklin's voice, but couldn't see him anymore: he was behind her, and had knelt down next to her table, judging from the height his voice was issuing from. She heard a small, very nearby "click", as though some bit of her had been snapped off, and heard Frankin set whatever-it-was that he had removed down on the table.

Wishing desperately that she could at least _see _what he was doing to her, she cried, "You're going to _what!?_"

"Relax, GLaDOS," came Franklin's voice again. "It's routine procedure."

And with that, he took her in both hands and picked her up.

She'd never known what it was like to _move—_or be moved, as the case was—before, and the sudden upward swing of her field of vision disoriented her so much that she let out a shrill yell of alarm. Her distress prompted a few soothing words from Franklin, but he made no move to put her down; instead, he descended the stairs with her in his arms, each step jolting her up and down in a dizzying pattern. Although she knew perfectly well that Franklin was doing his best to make her trip a smooth one, she couldn't help but yelp in fright each time his weight shifted from one step to the next.

"We're really going to have to give it that new voice soon, Oscar," moaned one of the white-coats. "If _that_'_s _what's going to be blaring out the PA system from this day on, I think I'll go crazy. No wonder Johnson told us to fix it."

"Today's installations'll take care of that," said Franklin, setting GLaDOS carefully on a low table next to one of the glowing computer terminals. After pausing a bit to calm down after being re-united with solid ground, she looked up at the blond doctor in astonishment. "You're going to change my _voice?_" She _liked _her voice; she didn't want it to change. Why did _they?_

"It'll be a better voice for you," he replied, bending over and connecting several slim, black cables to the monitors next to her. "The one you have now is too… immature."

"But I _like _it!" she whined. "I don't _want _a new one!"

A young man nearby glanced up from the papers he was shuffling through and grinned. "Your computer's having a tantrum, Dr. Franklin." Despite his casual tone, there was something in his eyes that belied how awed he was at the AI's being capable of such a novel, human thing.

His ears flushing bright pink, Franklin put a hand on top of her and met her gaze with stern eyes. "GLaDOS," he said, gently but deliberately, "You really don't have a choice." Giving her a pat, as though that would settle the matter, he leaned around behind her and connected her to the other computers, the glowing monitors flickering from blue to static as he did so.

_**Johnson**__ wants me to have a new voice, _she thought bitterly, remembering what Jonathan had said about the old man's wishes and orders always being carried out simply because he was "the boss". She also remembered how Jonathan had told her that _she _couldn't cross him, either, despite how important she was. She felt a surge of frustration at that thought: it was very, very difficult to lie down and let that wrinkly horror dictate her life when they both knew that she was something so superior to himself (she knew it wasn't right to think of herself as "superior", but she couldn't help it: she _knew_ she was). He would get some satisfaction from manipulating her, she knew: some reassuring illusion that, just because he had executive power over her, he could _control_ her in every way—that he was still the best.

As her frustration built up inside her like steam inside a sealed kettle, she felt a flash of something white and hot go through her mind: anger. So she 'didn't have a choice', huh? _We'll see about that, Mr. Johnson, _she thought, her mind-voice a low, scathing whisper that frightened her, but gave her a thrill of excitement nonetheless. _We'll just see about that._

She became aware of a high-pitched whirring sound, and looked up to see several white-coats gathered around one of the monitors and murmuring. Franklin, now a bit pale, glanced over his shoulder (he was one of those collected around the screen) at her. "GLaDOS, what are you thinking about?"

She looked around his body to see what was on the monitor: a three-dimensional graph formed into a topographical net of colored peaks. Most of the peaks were docile shades of indigo and blue, but one had spiked up to about three times the height of any of the others, and _that _peak was a deep crimson.

"Oh, nothing," she said, seeing an appropriate opportunity to try out her newly-learned form of "honesty". The novelty of the graph pushed her resentment towards Johnson to the back of her mind, and as she calmed down she noticed that red spike deepen in color and slowly sink back to join its fellows. "Nothing important."

She could see that Franklin was unsatisfied with this answer; however, before he could speak again, the door at the far end of the room—the same door, noted GLaDOS with a hint of nausea, that _Johnson_ had entered through the day before (there was a murmur from her right as the graph spiked briefly again)—opened a crack. A timid, female adult voice, echoing around the room despite its owner's attempts to be discreet, called out: "Hello? We don't mean to interrupt, but…"

"Oh, that's all right, Julia, I don't think we're interrupting anything." To GLaDOS' delight ("See, I _told _you she likes Stone best," said Franklin to the technician at his shoulder, pointing to another spike, emerald green, in the graph), Jonathan's clear, strong voice followed the woman's as the door swung open and the bushy-haired doctor ushered a tall lady and a small child into the room. The child was clutching at the woman's pant leg like a tiny trained monkey as the pair of them stepped through the doorway. Privately, GLaDOS wondered to herself why the woman didn't shake the clingy thing (which must certainly be hampering her movement) away, but then, realizing that the woman must be _extraordinarily_ "nice" to permit such a thing to happen, felt instead a sort of vague jealousy.

As they came into the room, Jonathan, seeing all of the white-coated people gathered around the terminals, gave Franklin a sheepish smile. "As I mentioned earlier, Oscar, I was just showing Julia and Rachel around the Center this morning, and thought they might have another peek at our GLaDOS before we begin. …We _aren't _interrupting anything, are we?"

Franklin stepped forward amid a chorus of "_Good morning, Doctor Stone_"s from the group and waved them farther in. "Oh, not at all, not at all; the party can't start without you anyway, Jonathan." Nodding cordially to the tall woman, who was gazing around at all the equipment in awe, he said in a slightly softer voice, "Julia, what a… what a surprise! I didn't see you yesterday; did you come to the activation?" Franklin was smiling brightly: evidently, she was well-liked by both he and Jonathan, and, for now, that was enough for GLaDOS to like her, too.

Tucking a strand of dark brown hair behind one small ear, the woman named Julia laughed and replied in a smooth, throaty voice: "No wonder you didn't see me, Dr. Franklin—that crowd was _incredible_. Poor Rachel—she was so upset by all the people that we had to leave after only a minute!" She laid a hand on the child's head, in a manner which GLaDOS recognized immediately as similar to the way in which Jonathan occasionally put his own hand on _her_: it was an affectionate, protective gesture, and the thought of it brought a faint, brief warmth.

The child, its deep brown eyes very wide, was staring at _her _now from behind the lady Julia's pant leg. Noticing this, Jonathan grinned at Rachel—for that was certainly the child's name—and knelt down so that he was at her head-height. "That's the computer. Do you want to meet her?" Those large eyes flicked towards him, but aside from that acknowledgement of his existence the girl made no reply.

"Are you sure, Jonathan?" Franklin gave his colleague a pointed look. "What if…"

"If what?" Jonathan smiled reassuringly. "It'll be a good experience for GLaDOS. Besides, we're all here: think if it as another test."

Franklin shrugged, then half-smiled. "'The toddler test', huh? Okay, Stone; she was your concept."

GLaDOS noted with amusement that a couple of the white-coated people had begun writing something new on their clipboards, then took a moment to examine the 'toddler' in question: as the first specimen of "child" she'd ever seen up close, this girl was especially important to remember and observe. She couldn't have been over two and a half feet tall, and was dressed in a long-sleeved pink shirt and a bizarre item of denim clothing that resembled pants, but with a panel of fabric covering the chest and two straps that went over the girl's tiny shoulders. _Overalls_, she thought suddenly; although conscious now that it was a connection failure that kept her from knowing _how _she knew such things, she knew that the word that had just popped into her head _must_ be the right word for such an object, and took the incident in stride (the error would be fixed soon, anyway; Jonathan, Franklin, and everyone else would see to that).

Like Charlene Rosenberg, Jonathan's colleague, the girl had skin the color of caramel, and deep brown eyes; however, while Rosenberg's hair had been brown, too, this girl's hair was jet black, and had been pulled into two pigtails that sprouted from either side of her head in little tufts. Even though this was the first child she'd ever taken the time to examine closely, GLaDOS thought privately that this one's features were unusually sharp: there was something about the firm way in which the jaw was set, something in the angle of the thin, black eyebrows, something piercing in the gaze of those almond eyes that was more reminiscent of an adult's physical looks than those of a toddler. The effect was strange, and the AI found that she didn't find this child very pleasant-looking at all—the glare she was currently receiving from said child, of course, notwithstanding.

_If her looks are as interesting as this_, she thought, _her _voice_ must be _just_ as interesting! _Wanting very badly to see if this child _could_, in fact, speak, among other things, the AI piped up loudly: "_I'd _like to meet you very much! My name's GLaDOS!"

With a small squeak, the little girl darted farther behind Julia's legs, the fingers of one chubby hand gripping a wad of khaki pant fabric with a tiny, yet viselike strength. Laughing brightly, Julia, laying a hand on the girl's head again and running her fingers consolingly through the fearful thing's tufts of hair, remarked, "Ooh, that _voice! _It's so _cute_, Jonathan! Like a little child… and that name, "GLaDOS": that's priceless! But it's frightened poor Rachel; oh, dear…" Unable to keep the smile from her face, she added, in a lower voice: "Rachel was _begging _me this morning to let her come look at the computer again: of course, she's only three, but she'd heard it could talk just like a real person, and—"

"But I _am _real!" said GLaDOS brightly. "I'm just as real as you are. I can feel things!"

At this, Julia became overcome with delighted giggles, and put one hand over her mouth, a deep blush staining her cheeks. "Oh, my goodness—oh Jonathan, it's—_she's _wonderful! Simply wonderful." Looking to GLaDOS, the woman swallowed, getting her laughter—which, the AI realized suddenly, wasn't completely mirthful laughter, but, in part, _nervous _laughter—under control, and said hesitantly, "I don't mean to insult you, GLaDOS; you're just… very, _very _astonishing." A smile deepening the creases in her flushed cheeks, she added, "When I first heard about this project years ago, I never imagined what you'd really be _like_, at the end of things… it was too… too _science-fiction-y _to picture. But, here you are!"

"GLaDOS has exceeded all of our expectations," said Jonathan proudly, giving the AI a sidelong glance. "Today's testing is simply routine procedure, all things considered."

"Yes; I suppose, considering all the things that could have gone wrong, it's… Hm? Rachel? Where're you going?"

Having detached herself from her mother, the little girl was making her way across the room to the low table on which GLaDOS (at least, the bit of herself that, for now, her _mind _was inside) sat. Jonathan, Julia, and everyone else in the room watched in silence, their eyes fixed on the small figure as she approached the computer, a look of dark determination on her strange face. The AI herself was wildly excited at the prospect of getting to _really _meet the child, but knew better than to begin speaking lest the little thing run back in fright again to its mother at the sound of her voice. All she could do was sit there and try to be patient while Rachel toddled over; and, although _patience _was something to which GLaDOS had never really taken to, she figured that, this time, a few minutes of holding still would be far and away worth the experience she was about to have… whatever _that _would be.

Finally, Rachel reached her low table, and, gripping the edge tightly, looked up at the computer. Again, that dark, piercing gaze struck GLaDOS as very adult for such a small, new person; _too _adult, in fact: after a moment, she found she had to look away. After glancing quickly around the room once, though, she became too anxious about what she might be missing to ignore the girl any longer, and looked back at her rather quickly.

Rachel was looking at her intently, as though the AI's existence were a puzzle she couldn't quite get her head around. Not moving her eyes from their object, she lifted one small, brown hand to her face and, to GLaDOS' surprise, put the fingers firmly in her mouth.

_Why _the child had done such a thing was beyond her, but there was no doubt in her mind that this new development was certainly interesting. She longed to ask Rachel why she'd done what she had—_did people_, she wondered suddenly, _**taste**__ good_ (whatever "taste" felt like)_?_—but, again, decided it would be better to let Rachel speak first.

If she ever _would, _really. To the impatient AI, it felt like _forever_ since the girl had first come near of her own accord. If she didn't have any intention of speaking, would she just stand there, sucking at her fingers indefinitely until it was time for Julia to come and collect her? Her behavior was very odd, especially with regards to her silence: all of the other humans she'd met had reacted to her in some way, and all had spoken to her, but this girl was doing neither. She just… _stared_.

However, just then Rachel leaned in closer over the edge of the table, and GLaDOS felt a rush of excitement: _this is it! _She could _tell _that the child was about to speak, and didn't dare look away, fairly quivering in anticipation. _Here we go! _

Opening her mouth, the girl removed her soggy fingers—_Oh, she _is _going to speak! _Thought the AI to herself—and tilted her head, blinking up at the computer. Suddenly, to GLaDOS' bewilderment, she reached up with her wet little hand and…

_Smack! _

"Oh, Rachel, _no!" _cried Julia, striding over to the table. "Oh, _no!_"

As her mother's arms (for the computer had come to the conclusion that Julia was the child's "mother") wrapped around her middle and lifted her into the air, there was a faint, wet 'pop' as the girl's hand unstuck itself from where she had planted it: right in the middle of the AI's bright orange "eye". Thin runners of saliva trailing from her pudgy fingers to the slimy spot on GLaDOS' surface, the girl threw her head back and let out a hearty peal of laughter, the sound ringing out clearly over her mother's embarrassed fussing and several of the white-coats' groans of dismay.

The distressed GLaDOS, unsure what to think of this state of affairs (was _this _really what all "children" were like!?), her vision blurred by whatever unspeakable fluid had been in that girl's mouth, heard, with a faint stab of something like betrayal, a deep laugh join the sounds of the room: Franklin's laugh. As he laughed, the blonde doctor took out a handkerchief and wiped her surface clean.

"Now, now, no harm done. I don't know about you, Stone, but I'd say GLaDOS just completed her first test of the day with flying colors!"

--

"That woman, I learned later, was Julia Johnson, niece of none other than dear, old Cave. She'd had a share in the company for a while, and had taken a great interest in me from the start of my development." The enormous display screens flickered to life again, displaying a photograph of a smiling, dark-haired woman seated in a chair, holding a small girl in her lap. "When I first met her, she was twenty-eight years old. Her daughter, Rachel, was three."

Her test subject was unusually quiet. Studying the larger-than-life photograph, Chell sat deep in thought, puzzling over something that had been nagging at her ever since these two new personalities' entrances into the story; however, trying to piece together just _what _was bothering her was like trying to make the North ends of two bar magnets touch: just when it seemed like she was getting close to putting the pieces together, one would slip away. Sighing, she let her gaze wander aimlessly over the photograph, searching for anything that would trigger some sort of epiphany.

She kept coming back to the face of the girl: to Chell, who had no memory to speak of and to whom nothing from outside the Enrichment Center ought to have been familiar, the sense of deja-vu she got when looking at that face was deeply unsettling. She tried to convince herself that there was nothing of interest in the child's countenance whatsoever, and that her frazzled, worn-out brain was playing tricks with her, but at the same time, she couldn't shake the feeling that there was something she was missing.

A small glint catching the corner of her eye, she looked over her shoulder and into her own reflection, happy, of only for a moment, for the distraction. Her reflection was a translucent ghost in a tattered jumpsuit, crouched in the glass wall of the small room housing the incinerator switch. The sight of her own face was a curiosity to her, and, while she didn't consider herself especially attractive, there was a certain strength to her features that she liked.

All of a sudden, a light—an outrageous, impossible light—went on in her head, and as she glanced back at the photograph: at the girl. Rachel.

_Rachel._

_Ra_**chell,** her mind corrected, deja-vu sending a chill up her spine: even though the girl in the picture was still so young that her face had yet to take on many definitive shapes, the high cheekbones and sharp, dark eyes marked that face as, unmistakably, the test subject's own.

Chell blinked. Then, she began to laugh.

After a while, her laughter faded to a wry smile, and she shook her head in amazement. " 'Rachel', huh? _That's _your big reveal?" She clasped her hands behind her head and looked up at the silent computer. "You could've been more melodramatic about it. Don't you know anything about building suspense?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," said the computer disdainfully. "If I _do _know what you're talking about, though, then in that case, I don't think _you _know what you'retalking about at all."

"I was on to you back then," grinned Chell, ignoring her. "I smacked you in the face."

GLaDOS sniffed. "That's completely irrelevant."

Leaning back until she was lying on the floor, Chell closed her eyes, folding her hands over her empty stomach. The relief that the revelation of a life before the one she knew gave her was a deep one, if cold: if nothing else, this was proof that she had at least _existed _before the day before yesterday, proof that her life had once had a purpose and routine other than that of playing a guinea pig in a laboratory.

"My name is Rachel Johnson," said Rachel Johnson to no-one in particular, and laughed again.

Once, she had been a real human being with a _real_ name, not just a test subject with a fragment of a name and an identification number. Once, she had been happy; once, she had known other things than the blank concrete walls and rusted passageways of the Enrichment Center. She had known sunlight and grass and trees and wind and blue sky. Once she escaped, she would know these things again, all these things that GLaDOS and all the other scientists and employees in this hellish facility had—somehow—taken from her. She would regain her identity as a real human being. When she did, she'd have a real name to match.

She opened her mouth to tell GLaDOS this (or, at least, choice bits and pieces of it), when a bright flash of pain lanced through her abdomen. With a gasp, she reflexively pulled herself into a sitting position, clasping her aching stomach with both hands.

Of course, she'd been aware of her hunger for a long time now, but there had always been far more pressing, far more _deadly_ things to focus on: after all, if she'd been thinking of her belly while she was making her way though the test chambers instead of minding the trajectory of an energy pellet or the path of a sliding glass platform, she would have gotten very dead, very quickly. However, this—this _pain—_was new. Now, after sitting still for a while and letting the adrenaline of her ordeal ebb mostly away, her body was beginning to remind her, none too gently, just how meager a sustenance the water she'd been able to glean from leaks in walls here and there (a bit bitter and metallic-tasting, but better than nothing) had truly been.

As she curled in on herself, wrapping her arms around her middle, another dart of pain shot through her, prompting Rachel Johnson to acknowledge something else new about herself: she wasn't simply _hungry_, but positively famished.

"There's something the matter with you now. I know there is. What is it?" The computer's voice as it sliced through Chell's thoughts was accusatory, as though the test subject were hiding something from her on purpose.

"Your captive audience is starving, GLaDOS," Chell said, gritting her teeth. "Got a plan?"

There was a pause. As the faint echoes of the test subject's voice faded into the white noise of the chamber, the AI spoke up:

"No, you're not."

Chell blinked.

"Not _starving_, that is," she continued. "_Duh. _The way you are now, in this room, there are still approximately seventy-four hours to go before you die. Not exactly what I'd call 'starving'." She sighed. "_Now _who's the melodramatic one?"

"Oh, _that's_ reassuring," said Chell, with a hearty dose of sarcasm. "But, of course, a _machine _wouldn't understand what it's _like_ to go without food for two days, would it?"

_Two days_.

Saying it out loud made her really realize how long she'd been stuck in those chambers, and she took a moment to marvel at her relative good fortune: thanks to the water she'd been able to salvage, she hadn't passed out once from dehydration—if she _had_, she knew now that no-one, least of all an "intubation associate" (whatever _those _were), would have come to revive her, despite what GLaDOS' pre-recorded babble had assured back then.

"Oh, now _that _was a cheap shot," whined the "machine" in question. "Nonetheless, I'm going to take the high road, and not hold it against you. Furthermore," she added, "while I may not have any personal experience with such a thing, I am thoroughly aware of the biological processes which your organs and tissues are now undergoing, and I can imagine how unpleasant it must be…" GLaDOS—or, rather, her voice—grinned. "Of course, though, you're still right: I've really got no clue! Isn't it funny, how that works out?

"It's all your fault, you know," she continued. "If you'd behaved, you might have gotten some cake."

Chell couldn't remember ever being truly hungry before, but even after only a short taste of the experience she could, without hesitation, say that she'd rather face ten more pits of toxic sludge than endure this for much longer. The feeling she'd been living with for the last couple of days had gradually gone from annoying to distractingly uncomfortable; what was happening now, however, was downright agonizing,and vaguely frightening_. _

And here was that hateful computer, gabbing away about _cake. _

Strangely, although Chell could remember nothing about herself aside from a name (even 'Rachel Johnson', what she now knew her full name to be, still eemed alien to her), her knowledge about the outside world was intact—including what "cake" tasted like. However, what she could recall about the taste of cake was limited to vague feelings of pleasure, a sketch of some delicious flavor that, at the moment, was thoroughly beyond her powers of imagination. Her mouth felt as though it had been scrubbed with cotton, and the only flavor she could summon to memory was the biting tang of that water she'd salvaged from cracks in the walls.

Chell had to admit that it was all pretty pathetic.

What right did a _computer_ have to talk about cake, anyway? GLaDOS had said it herself: she had never known anything like what her test subject was now going through. So what did _she _know about _cake_?

Absolutely nothing, that's what.

Chell told her so. To her surprise, the computer burst out laughing:

"Oh, don't I? Well, that's what _you'd _think. It's more about the psychology of the thing, really, for me. You might call it a principle." Although it sounded as though there was a lot of thought behind this statement, she didn't elaborate, instead continuing cheerfully: "However, all of that aside, you've got a point. In a few more hours, you'll surely be in too much pain to properly enjoy the story, and that _would _be a shame. So… I suppose I'll have to let you find something to eat.

"People," she added, "Are not very durable."

At once, a slim section of the wall slid upwards, not too far from where the incinerator sat hulking in its corner. Picking herself up from the floor and wincing as another pang of hunger twisted her insides, Chell, not pausing to think of the remarkable ease with which GLaDOS had agreed with her, stared at the black rectangle—about the size and shape of your average doorway—that had been a panel of solid concrete just a moment earlier. Taking a few steps forward (and limping a bit as the feeling came prickling back into her toes), she tried to make out what lay beyond the boundaries of the doorframe, with little success: it was pitch black in there. "The surprises just keep coming," she muttered, squinting into the dark.

"Tell me about it," deadpanned GLaDOS. "Light switch is on the right, by the way."

Groping for said light switch, her fingers tracking deep grooves in what felt like (and, come to think of it, probably _was_) decades' worth of dust, Chell stepped over the threshold…

…And into infinity. A thin shriek escaping her, she lost her balance and plunged forward into the darkness, throwing her hands out automatically—she broke her fall, and very nearly her wrists: it was three feet to the ground. Groaning and rubbing at the several bits of her left throbbing from the impact, she paused for a moment, waiting for her heartbeat to slow before attempting to stand.

"Mind the gap_,_" said GLaDOS.

--

_Closing Notes:__ Whee, bit of a cliffhanger there (pun most certainly intended). Nothing much to say, aside from a big, ginormous oh-my-gawd thank-you to everyone who's reading and being patient with my snail's-pace updates. :) Stay tuned: and if you stop by to Fave or Alert, I'd appreciate a quick review so I know what you liked (or think I need to work on)! Feedback is how I learn, after all._

_Until next time!_


	6. Office Space

_Edit 11/29/08:__ Figures. I want to upload a chapter that's hideously late, and my computer decides to go, "nope, just kidding!" and crash. Everything's hunky-dory now (thank shai'hulud for external hard drives), but those who were expecting this a bit earlier in the month (sorry, Gryphonworks) got stood up. Sorry, guys. :/_

_Author's Notes:__ Hahahaha, I _LIVE_! Oh, LOL, just look at the time! :D Ugh. I'm such a screwball when it comes to keeping to a schedule. Many apologies for the over six-month-late(!! Eww eww eww!!) chapter. If I'd only just stuck to the plan (and if cold, cruel reality hadn't been barging in as often as it's been), I'd be up to chapter __**eleven **__by now…_

_Speaking of Portal, though:_

_Kotaku dot com: it's spoiler-iffically delicious, and I couldn't resist! On June 10__th__, some leaked info and dialogue from Portal 2 was posted to that site—stuff revealing several massive plot points that knocked me completely off-guard. While I've got to admit that what the team's got planned _does _sound awesome, I'm still holding out hope that there's far more to this than meets the eye._

_Well, in light of this new reveal, my fic has been knocked from "woulda'-coulda'-shoulda'-harmless-speculation-AU" into the realm of "blatheringly-off-the-mark, canon-defying-AU". …But that's okay. :3 Comes with the territory of writing fic for a story with a coming sequel, after all. Haha, now I know how earlier Harry Potterfic writers felt! My sympathies, guys._

_Although, there's always Episode 3 to channel my desperate fantard hopes into. :3 So, I'll do that. Borealis, ho~!_

_C'mon, man. Don't let me down. :D_

_In other news, I'm currently slogging my way through __Myst__ on my brand spankin' new DS Lite. That game and I have a special relationship: no matter how hard it beats my brain into oatmeal, I, masochist that I am, keep coming back for more. I just wish someone would tell me that puttering around Myst Island for nigh __**two hours **__without accomplishing anything but reading a bunch of scrambled journals, pushing a bunch of switches, and generally being useless is okay._

_And I __**still **__haven't solved that fucking "dimensional imager" puzzle. Oh, __Myst__, they should sell you with a leather whip and matching bondage collar._

_Also, I saw WALL-E twice first weekend it came out. __**F00king adorable. **__I'll save the gushing for a separate occasion, though… or possibly a flufftastic oneshot. :3 for Halloween, I was EVE and my roomie was WALL-E… :P Good times. "Ee-_vaah!_" Awww._

_Also, I read Frank Herbert's __Dune__. Fanfic definitely coming up for that book—the Fremen kick major amounts of bum. Now, though, on to chapter six. :3 Fi-na-lly._

_-----_

After she had found the light, Chell could see that the walls of the corridor were lined with shelves.

The shelves were filled with boxes, papers, and folders, some neatly stacked, others fallen over into heaps. The floor was concrete. On the ceiling, at intervals, were bolted naked lightbulbs, each giving off a pale yellow light that, to Chell, seemed rather sickly.

Like everywhere else—excluding, of course, the spotless test chambers—in the facility, this corridor was in a state of decay.

Rotting cobwebs hung like gauze from the lights and the corners of the shelves. They clung to the yellowed, swollen folders and stacks of papers in snowy membranes. Every conceivable surface was bleared with dust, and the air was choked with it. As Chell took a few steps forward through a coat of the stuff so thick it may as well have been snow, she gagged on the dust, but also on the _smell _of the air: it was the smell of things left mouldering too long in the dark, of paper left to be eaten away by its own acids, of flaking rust and cold metal.

It was the smell of abandonment, and now, with dust settling in her hair and coating her hands and side from her fall, _she _smelled like it, too.

No-one had been in this place for God (_or GLaDOS, _her mind supplemented) knew how long. If she was going to find food, it wasn't going to be here. So why had that murderous computer shown her _this _way, of all things? Casting a dubious look at the shadowy expanse where the lights ended—some seventy or so yards away—she turned on her heel and eyed the (by contrast) brightly-lit rectangle from whence she'd come.

Suddenly, with a slickly mechanical _whoosh_, that rectangle was gone.

With a cry born more of indignation at having been tricked again than anything, Chell stumbled back to the ledge and threw herself at the door, slamming her palms into the metal with an echoing bang. Anything and everything that came to mind, if she deemed it horrible enough, was hurled as loudly as she could through that door, including suggestions of various anatomical feats that GLaDOS, as a computer, probably wouldn't be able to execute.

All of this, however, was no use. The door stayed closed, as Chell had known it would, and, when she paused for breath, she realized that her hands were sore from all the banging.

"You've gotten very talkative since you escaped. I'm impressed." The AI's voice, a bit muffled but otherwise unaffected, issued from somewhere behind the walls. "However, you seem to fail to recognize _help _when it's offered: I just want to make sure you're going the right way."

Chell sneezed and rubbed her stinging palms together. "I've heard _that _one before. You've got a skewed idea of 'the right way'."

"Oh, you're not still mad about that whole Chamber Nineteen thing, are you?" the computer scoffed. "If I were you, _I'd_ let bygones be bygones. You're so immature, really, it's no wonder you don't have any friends." As she paused to let that sink in, Chell sneezed again.

"Besides," the AI continued, "Why would I get you lost if I wanted to keep you alive?"

Chell had to admit that her captor had a point. Still, she didn't like the thought of the computer being able to _herd_ her like this, nor did she like the looks of where she was meant to go. She stood still.

The computer spoke again, her voice high and mocking: "If you want to eat, you're going to have to move, you know."

The dust in the air had turned the test subject's saliva to a paste, and her throat stuck uncomfortably when she tried to swallow. Making a face, Chell thought of water, and what a nice thing it was. As much as it pained her to admit it, the computer was right again—there was nothing in her immediate surroundings that could count as 'food', unless, of course, she wanted to eat paper.

Grudgingly, she turned away from the wall and began to make her way down the corridor.

Her belly hurt, and walking was a bit difficult: it felt as though someone had tied a knot inside her, and every step pulled that knot a little tighter. Yet walk she did, from pool of yellow light to pool of yellow light, cobwebs brushing her face in sticky tendrils, with only the sound of her own irregular breathing to break the thick silence. The shock absorbers on her legs left dragging marks in the dusty film on the floor. The normally bright _clang _they made against concrete was muffled here to a dull _'thump'_, and, as hateful and unnatural as the things were, Chell found that she missed the familiar sound they made: without it to announce her presence, she felt like a ghost.

As Chell walked, GLaDOS resumed her story, her voice sounding thin through the walls of the lonely passageway:

"Julia insisted upon leaving, despite Jonathan's assurances that she was welcome to stay, and after _she _was gone, the real business of testing resumed…

-----

"Let's start with the basics, shall we?" Smiling, Franklin wheeled around in his chair and entered something into his boxlike terminal. A moment later, his one monitor flickered from blue to black, with a bright green cursor blinking in one corner. "This first test will consist of a simple question-and-answer session: I'll ask you some questions, and you just do your best to answer."

Jonathan took a seat at the terminal next to him and smiled at GLaDOS. "Are you ready?"

"Sure, Doctor Jonathan-Stone," she replied. She only had only half-processed what Franklin had said—her experience with the toddler was still fresh, and all she could see in her mind's eye was that stoic little creature's slimy hand coming right at her—a thought that kept her from really paying attention to much around her. The thing that bothered her the most, however, wasn't the goo the girl had left on her lens (_that_ had been wiped away by Franklin, thank goodness), but the questions she had risen in her mind. What could the Rachel-thing's _motivation _for such an act have been? Had there even _been _a motivation?

_Was it possible_, she thought, _to __**do**__ things 'just because'? _Did everything need motive? Or could some things just happen… simply because one _wanted _them to?

This new thought sent a shiver up her spine—metaphorically, of course. The idea that, perhaps, not everything needed a purpose was a terribly exciting one, but it was also a bit frightening.

Then again, what was to say that Rachel _hadn't _had some motivation for what she had done? Something told her that "children" generally weren't cunning enough to operate under ulterior motives, but, from what she'd already seen of the way the world and the people in it worked, she knew not to dismiss the possibility.

"Your name?"

Startled back into reality by Franklin's voice, she replied, "Huh?"

"The first question: 'what is your name'?" His back to her, the scientist was entering more things into his terminal as he spoke. She felt very curious about what he could be writing about her, but decided that she'd probably be told later, and that it would be better to concentrate on the questions.

"My name? It's…" she stopped, confused, and said, "…but you _know _my name!" A thought occurring to her, she added quietly, "…Have you forgotten it already?"

Jonathan laughed and shook his head. "No, of course we haven't—this is only a routine question."

"Oh," said GLaDOS, relieved. After a pause to collect herself, she said as clearly as she could: "I am the Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operating System—'GLaDOS'."

"Very good," murmured Franklin. "Next question: what was the date of your activation?"

Confused again, the computer blurted out, "But you know _that_, too! If you know that I know all of this stuff, and you expect me to know that you know that I know you know about all this stuff, too, then why are you asking me about all of these things that I know you know I know about? Why can't you just type in what you know I know _you _know—because you _do _know it—into those computers _yourselves?"_

Franklin and Stone had turned to face her, and she stopped to observe the dazed expressions on both the scientists' faces. "I don't get it," she added.

Jonathan and his partner exchanged a look. Franklin leaned back in his chair. "Er… well, because that's not really the _point._"

Jonathan nodded. "It's not that we need toknow the answers _themselves—_rather, what we really need to know is how well _you _can _remember _the answers."

"We want to see how _your _mind works," added Franklin, "not how _ours _work. We know _that _pretty well already." He smiled.

She thought about this for a bit, then said, "Oh, _that _makes sense! Okay, then, I'm ready."

"Good," said Franklin, and turned back to his terminal.

"…Doctor Franklin?"

He turned around again. "Yes, GLaDOS?"

"Well…" she paused, trying to put together the right words. "Um… if you and Doctor Jonathan and Doctor Rosenberg and everyone put me together, than shouldn't you know the best out of anybody how I work? Better than me, even?"

The two scientists looked at each other, than back into the inquisitive orange "eye" of their creation. To her surprise, neither of them answered her right away. She'd assumed that they would reply immediately, and their silent, slightly puzzled stares were enough to put a very small dent in her mental image of them as pillars of knowledge. It was a small dent, felt only on an unconscious level, but a dent nonetheless.

Fortunately, whatever conscious doubt had been creeping up on her during their silence was squashed by Jonathan's assured response:

"Well, of course we know how you_ work_, if you take that to mean that we know how you're put together and what each little part of you does. Usually, by taking something apart one can figure out precisely how it ought to work, but you're not something with which that method really works." He leaned forward, his soft blue eyes looking into her large orange one. "That method only works with simple machines, like typewriters or microwaves… or toasters." He smiled. "You're not simple, not by a long shot: we built your brain, but you have a _mind_, something that, like the human mind, can't be understood from simply opening you up." He and Franklin shared a look. "…In fact, sometimes I nearly forget you're _not _human."

'Wow, _really?"_ Flattered, she flicked her gaze around the room, noting first the technicians chatting and working nearby, then the glowing computer terminals. _I'm not like you at all, _she thought to them, remembering what she had thought of them earlier. This time, though, there was none of that other feeling, no loneliness—just conviction and pride. They were stupid, and she was much better.

"A little bit." Jonathan turned back around and typed something into his terminal. "That's why we have to ask you these questions—just to check on your mind. We're also asking them so that we can figure out the best way of fixing that communication gap I told you about earlier."

Oh, right: the problem. She was self-conscious about the fact that there was something wrong with her, even though she didn't really understand just _what _the problem _was_.

_That's okay, though. Today, it will be fixed._

Franklin glanced over his shoulder. "Please answer the question, GLaDOS."

Startled, she remembered what he was talking about immediately. "Oh—oh, right! Hmm." Using, again, a tone of voice that she thought sounded terribly impressive, she recited, "I was activated on the fourteenth of January, in the year Nineteen Ninety-Nine."

"Well done. Where are you right now?"

The answer was automatic: "I am in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center."

"Very good. …And in which state is the Enrichment Center located?"

_What?_ "Huh? _State? _Hey,I don't—" suddenly, she interrupted herself with the answer. It was a strange-sounding word, one that she immediately recognized as _meaning_ something but had never thought connected to herself or this place (_her home_) in any way. Bewildered, she said, "Wait—I didn't say that! I mean, I _did_, but…"

"It's all right," muttered Franklin, typing energetically at his terminal. "Next question: which country?"

"Ooh, ooh, I know this one! The United States of America!"

Jonathan chuckled. "Correct. Nicely done."

-----

The corridor was endless. It had to be.

Days—or, rather, what _felt _like days— of sleep deprivation, coupled with hunger and extreme psychological strain, had completely drained Chell of all her energy, and she shambled down the corridor like a dusty zombie. The balls of her feet throbbed with every step, and she fancied that she could feel each individual point where the bones pressed against the floor. Bent nearly double with fatigue, she kept her eyes on the darkness at the far end of the corridor, which seemed to retreat from her with every painful step she took towards it. Rusted metal shelves, sheathed in cobweb and shadow and stuffed with moldy papers, lined her peripheral vision in an endless parade of decay.

"GLaDOS?"

Breaking off her story abruptly, the computer snapped, "_Again! _You interrupted _again_. I think you're doing this on purpose."

Chell rubbed at her temple with one dust-floured palm. "Mm-hm. Look… this must be a dead end."

There was a pause. "A dead end?"

Chell stopped walking and leaned against a shelf, feeling cool metal through the dust. "Yes."

"…Are you _sure?"_

"Well, it seems to me to be going all of nowhere." Chell looked up, scanning the walls and ceiling for anything that might have been a video camera. "I've been walking for ages, and it's nothing but these shelves—this place may as well _be _a dead end, for all the help it's been." She sneezed. "So much for 'going the right way'."

This proclamation was met with silence, and, having not caught sight of any cameras or similar things which the computer could use to spy on her test subject, Chell turned to the shelf and gingerly lifted the flap of a manila folder. The decades of dust ground into the thing gave it a very unpleasant texture, and Chell held the flap between two fingers as she leaned forward to read what was printed on the papers inside. Although they were stained and yellowed with age, and the print faded with dust, she could make out enough words to tell that they were a status report of some kind: words like "CONFIRMED" and "INSPECTED" kept popping up a lot. Other words, such as "RADIOACTIVE" and "COMBUSTIBLE" weren't quite as numerous, but they certainly caught the eye. She paused, then, on impulse, tucked the whole folder under one arm.

_Why the hell not, _she thought to herself. Perhaps boning up on some Aperture methodology would help her glean insight into her own predicament. GLaDOS' history lessons would take a while to get up to anything relevant to her interests, she concluded, and, after all, there was a significant chance that the computer would embellish bits and pieces here and there, either for the sake of deception or the sake of interesting storytelling. Whatever. The thing Chell was certain of was this: she'd trust GLaDOS about as far as she could throw her (_sans_ Portal Device, of course), and next to the AI, a stack of moldy paper was integrity incarnate.

Besides, the computer had been her only resource thus far about this place, and she craved fresh information. Said information being both fresh _and _minus the crazy was an added bonus.

"A dead end? You really think so? Hmm… perhaps you're not as intelligent as I thought you were." The computer gave a scraping, mechanical sigh. "What a letdown."

Chell made a noise in the back of her throat.

"Well, I won't be giving you any hints. This will be another test, then; it should be interesting. Or embarrassing. Depends on how long it takes you."

Chell took one hand off the folder and put it to her aching head. "Oh, no way. No, no, no."

"I'm sorry," replied GLaDOS in a disconnected, sickeningly cheery voice. "I believe the correct response is 'oh, yes, yes, yes'. What a _fun _learning experience!"

There was a beat of silence while Chell let this sink in. Her thoughts were shorting out; there were no words to capture the hatred she felt for the AI. Shaking with emotion and fatigue, she growled, "No. I don't think so."

"I do."

"Shut up."

"No."

"Look." She took a deep breath. "If you don't tell me where I'm supposed to go, I _will _pass out, right here, right now, and you'll never get to finish your stupid story."

The computer snarled, "You wouldn't _dare._"

Chell stood her ground. "Oh, yes, I _would._ In fact, I don't think I shall wake up, and then you'll _never_ get to finish it _at all, _because, after a while, I'll be dead." Standing up a little straighter, she raised her voice enough to hear it echo down the corridor. "I'll be dead, and you won't have gotten to kill me yourself. And face it: there'll never be another test subject like me. If _I _die, you'll have lost your golden opportunity: no-one will ever _appreciate _you again. You'll be miserable forever." She waited until the echoes subsided, then muttered into the silence, "…Plus, I'll never have gotten to kill _you_, and I'm really looking forward to that."

"Hmmm," mused the computer. "You make a good point… and you drive a hard bargain. I really don't know."

Chell affected the most pathetic whine she could and howled, "_Oooh, _everything's _spinning! _Oh, I feel so _faint… _I don't think I_ have _much _ti—_"

"All right, all right! I'll tell you. Now be _quiet_," GLaDOS snapped. "You're so _fragile._"

Chell said nothing.

"Now… judging by the location of your voice, the door you need must be… oh, maybe a few yards back, on the left-hand wall? Just re-trace your steps; it's _not_ very hard_._"

Gritting her teeth, the test subject turned around and started back up the passage, scanning the wall for anything resembling a door. The shelving left most of everything behind it in deep shadow, and it was nearly impossible to make out anythi—

_Hang on._

There was something behind the shelf. Chell leaned closer, squinting through the dust and shadow at the faint vertical crack in the wall. She reached over the stacks of folders and ran her fingers over it, feeling the split in the concrete. It was far too uniform to have been caused by an accident, and appeared to span the wall from ceiling to floor. Feeling her heartbeat pick up speed, Chell quickly set her folder down on the floor and took the edge of the shelving unit in her hands. She tugged it away from the wall, shuddering involuntarily at the screech of steel on concrete, and gazed in amazement at the door that, sure enough, now stared her in the face. It was a plain, windowless door, with a metal handle, and as she picked up her folder from the ground she noted the drag lines the shelving had made in the dust when she'd dragged it away.

_Wait a second._

Just as she'd expected, there was a clean set of tracks from the four legs of the frame, but there were other marks, too: they were older and blurred by a dust layer of their own, but still clearly showed where those same four legs had scraped through once before.

What this meant was clear: sometime after this hallway had fallen into disuse, someone had come and hidden this door.

Chell shrugged and turned the handle. The dust made it feel coated with a layer of short fur. _Whoever hid this door, and why, _she thought to herself, _probably doesn't matter much. Maybe they ran out of wall space._

"Ah! You've found it!" GLaDOS 'smiled'. "That was _very good!_ Although, I don't understand why you were moving furniture. Maybe that part was a bit unnecessary. You really shouldn't waste time."

As the door opened, letting out a puff of air stale enough to make her gag, Chell reached one arm inside and groped for a light switch. Finding nothing but wall, she took a step inside, into a darkness so stark it was almost a physical presence. She groped further. "Come _on_…"

Something cold skittered across her left foot.

Sucking in a sharp breath through her teeth, the woman who had traversed pits of acid and crossed matter-vaporizing energy fields unfazed felt her spine prickle with revulsion. _Insects! _It was just her luck that they would be the first truly living things she would encounter in this God-forsaken facility. Having spent all of her remembered life surrounded by cold, sterile machines and materials, being _snuck up on_ by another squishy thing was startling, especially since it took her a moment to actually recognize what that thing _was. _However, it didn't take much thinking to see the good omen that the thing really was: where there were insects, there was food for insects… and, possibly, food for test subjects, too.

For what seemed the first time in her life, Chell felt something like hope. Maybe things were looking up, after all.

At that moment, she found the switch and flipped it, bringing the one bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling flickering to life. Its light, while meager, was enough to illuminate most of the room: like the hallway, its walls were lined with shelves, but a few of them had been overturned and lay broken across the stained floor, their contents scattered around in yellowed drifts and heaps. She took a paper from the floor and used it to jam the door, wadding it inside the mechanism before she shut herself off from the hallway—she had learned not to take any chances in the Enrichment Center.

This room bore a superficial resemblance to the hall outside, but, as she stepped further inside, she realized that some of the shelves were not stacked with folders at all, but massive sheets of deep blue paper, written on in white. There were long, sealed tubes scattered on the floor, and she picked one up, opening the end: it was stuffed with a roll of the same paper. _How strange,_ she thought, and dropped the empty tube to the floor, unrolling its contents against a nearby shelf. The sheet was so large she had to hold it open with both hands, and its gridded surface was covered all over with white outlines of things that looked like machinery. Something prickled in the back of her mind—she _knew _she knew what these papers were, and what these drawings meant, somehow—but epiphany eluded her. One side of the paper began to slip, and she adjusted it, looking up as she did so.

Her eyes went wide, and the paper dropped to her feet.

_Cans._

There must have been _dozens_ up there, neatly stacked on the top two shelves of the unit she stood in front of. Feeling a sudden rush of elation, she gave a little whoop of joy and danced back on her shock absorbers, getting a better view: the labels were too dusty to read, but the part of her that remembered things on its own told her that, more often than not, _food _was found in cans. The shelf was too high to reach, but Chell was no stranger to ingenuity: she retrieved a broken piece of metal (probably from a shelving unit) from the floor, took aim, and threw it like a javelin at the stack of cans, knocking about five down to earth. Each one hit the floor with a crack like a starting pistol, and the noise had barely faded when Chell dove towards the nearest one and snatched it up, a demented squirrel in an orange jumpsuit hunched over a chestnut.

"What _was _that noise? You're making a mess, aren't you?" GLaDOS' voice was a bit fainter now that two walls separated her from her test subject, but Chell wouldn't have heard her anyway: she was captivated by the object in her hands. It was a dusty can labeled "Swift & Wolpaw's Premium Lentil Soup", but in that moment it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She turned it over.

It had a flip-top. _Hallelujah! _Gathering her pile of cans around her, she sat back against the leg of a shelf and tore open the can, breathing deeply of the cold soup's heavy, green aroma. When she stopped to take another breath, she found herself begin to laugh uncontrollably with joy, and wondered faintly if she was going mad.

"_What_ are you doing? Answer me!" GLaDOS snapped. "I mean it! Are you even listening to me? I _command _you to answer! _Hey!_"

Chell did not answer. In-between gulps of stale soup, her laughter increased in volume and intensity until she was helpless to hold it in. Throwing her head back, she surrendered to hysteria, and all the fear, confusion, and agony of the past few days erupted from her body in shrieking sounds a bit closer to screams than to laughter. To her overwhelmed mind, the experience was frightening, but cathartic: the food in her hands had been what made it seem okay to let go in such a way, the hope it brought her triggering a total abandonment of composure. This outpouring of emotion wasn't a sign of complete madness, as she feared—Chell _was _a bit nuts, but still far more rational than she gave herself credit for—but rather a result of immense relief and something she'd never felt before in great quantities: positive emotion. More specifically, _optimism. _The moment she'd tasted the soup, three things had stood out in her mind like flares: she was alive, she had food, and she was ready to turn her circumstances the hell around.

She wasn't sure _how_, exactly, she'd accomplish this, but she was ready to, and, of course, that's what _really_ mattered. She was alive, and she was ready.

"Hello? I can hear you laughing. Is there something wrong? Why won't you answer me? I don't appreciate you ignoring me like this. _I'm _the reason you've got food, you know. I know you've got food, because you've stopped talking. Or maybe I'm just saying that to feel better about the fact that you're _ignoring_ me." The computer paused, then snarled, "…You know what? I hope you _choke_."

-----

_Closing Notes__: Whew! Dayum, that took way longer than it should've. The problem, I think, was that what I was playing with before was actually two chapters' worth of material that I was trying to squish into one… so, chapter seven and eight will follow swiftly on the heels of this one. :P Apologies to everyone waiting for an update… hopefully, this was a one-time thing. And even if I do drop of the face of the Earth again, do not fear—a new chapter will come eventually. I'm not one to abandon a story… and _no,_ the __Pirates of the Caribbean__ fanfic that I started and left to die in the seventh grade does _not _count. Pshh, even _I _have standards. 9_9_

_¡Hasta luégo! –Oh, and please: if you spot any grammatical errors, plotholes, or other things that ought not to be, please let me know! :) Thanks!_


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